The Robertson Building

Like all really vital organizations the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID, Suite 250) is continuously working to revitalize itself not only to ensure it remains relevant well into the future, but also to support and encourage a new generation of women to become involved in feminist politics and human rights. AWID is continuously finding ways to re-energize issues and make the necessary organizational changes to reflect transformations in the landscape of women's rights.

AWID was founded in 1982 as a membership organization of women involved in international development who were concerned with the role of women in the development process. The World Conference on Women held in China in 1995 marked a turning point for groups engaged in transforming gender relations. As Executive Director Joanna Kerr explains, after the world conference the emphasis shifted to "trying to increase the rights of women through any type of process, not just international development." AWID took a look at itself, questioned how relevant it was, and realized it needed to make sure that it had a broad representation of women from the rest of the world as part of the organization.
 
In 2000 Joanna, then the President of the Board of Directors, was encouraged to step in as Executive Director. Joanna had been working hard to change the direction of the organization and saw this as an exciting opportunity to be even more influential. She had a few conditions: that the organization move to Canada, and that the name be
changed. So, the group moved up north and the Association for Women in Development became the Association for Women's Rights in Development. "This was the beginning of a radical transformation."

Joanna helped mould AWID into not simply a provider of information and services about women, development,
and human rights, but as a uniting organization that now brings together over six thousand individual members
and one hundred and fifty institutional members. An organization that once found its membership almost exclusively in the United States has managed to effectively internationalize its efforts now finding membership primarily in the global south. AWID's shift in outreach was aided in large part by a move of its headquarters from Washington DC to Canada.

Joanna explains: "I think Toronto is a much better environment to do this kind of work - it is a perfect place to run an international organization because of the labour force. The diversity that we are able to hire in this space you
certainly couldn't get in Washington DC. It's a young city and it's just been a really positive and hospitable environment for us to do our work."

In order to transform itself into a strongly focused international organization, AWID has a low profile in Canada. They have an international board, which excludes them from charitable status (fifty-one per cent of the board would
need to be Canadian in order for them to be eligible). "We didn't want to have a huge Canadian membership. We
wanted to be able to really listen and respond to the needs of our members in the rest of the world."

One of AWID's key projects is the International Forum on Women's Rights and Development that effectively brings
together close to two thousand people from 120 countries to discuss and debate the key issues facing women's
rights. It is hard to achieve consensus on complex issues like sex work and trafficking, or HIV/AIDS, but the forum
makes sure that the discussion in open and on-going.

"We're developing more holistic work around HIV/AIDS, so for the past several years we've been doing a lot of work
with young women activists in Africa. For us, we can't look at HIV/AIDS without looking at it as a women's rights issue. Women's vulnerability has increased, as has the rate of women with HIV/AIDS, so we see prevention in terms of women's empowerment and young women's rights activism. We've been holding leadership institutes over the past couple of years in five countries in Africa and held a regional one in Asia."

AWID is already gearing up for the next International Forum, likely to be held in the Middle East in 2008, and continues to explore new avenues. They plan to open a couple of new offices in countries where they have a large
membership base. Joanna says, "even though we work quite effectively virtually, we have ten websites and put
out six or seven e-lists a week, we're trying to reach our tentacles around - to be a truly international organization."

www.awid.org