Strategic Plan 2011-2013

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Introduction Gender at Work (www.genderatwork.org) is an international non-profit (501c3) incorporated in

the Washington DC and in Toronto, Canada. Gender at Work was founded in 2003 by the

Association of Women’s Rights in Development, UNIFEM, CIVICUS, and Women’s Learning

Partnership. As a virtual network with no central office, our Associates and Facilitators are

located in different parts of the world. We currently have strong teams of Associates and

Facilitators in India (3 Associates, 4 Facilitators) and South Africa (1 Associate, one Program

Associate and 3 Facilitators). These teams along with our Global Associates carry out national,

regional and international programs. Programs are currently being carried out in South

Africa, India, Morocco, Albania, Nepal and Rwanda. We recently completed a program in

Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda and another in Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Sudan.

Gender at Work is governed by a small international Board of Directors and a small staff

in Toronto support Associates and Facilitators to carry out their work and international efforts.

With an annual budget of approximately USD 1 million, our work focuses on partnering with

other organizations to improve their ability to achieve women’s empowerment and contribute

to gender equality. With the aim of creating new norms and cultures of equality, we take on

complex organizational change processes in challenging environments. We support local,

national and international social change organizations to change their structures, culture,

processes and programs in order to be able to negotiate new meanings and values, support the

empowerment of women and facilitate progress toward gender equality goals within the

sphere of public action. Gender at Work’s experience to date is that, with the right tools and

support, organizations can create transformative change internally and within the communities

they serve.

Gender at Work’s Strategic Plan 2011-2013 builds upon and largely continues the directions set

in our earlier strategic plan (2008-2011). This plan endorses the mission and goals delineated in

2008:

Our mission

Gender at Work is an international collaborative that strengthens organizations to build

cultures of equality and social justice, with a particular focus on gender equality.

Our Goals

We will achieve our mission through pursuing the following goals:

1. To advance gender equality and transform power relations by supporting both local and

global social change organizations to change their structures, processes, and programs.

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2. To spotlight and change the overt and covert rules and exclusionary practices of social

institutions and organizations that maintain inequalities, through new analytical tools,

ways of thinking, and practices.

3. To grow, strengthen and sustain Gender at Work and its partnerships in a way that

reflects our values: equality, accountability and work-life balance.

What Have We Accomplished? From 2001 when Gender at Work began program work, to the beginning of our current plan,

our primary accomplishments have been to:

1. Develop our thinking regarding institutions and organizations and the role they play in

maintaining gender inequality. Our writing and presentations on this have resonated

with a variety of people in the field, and have been widely applied and adapted1.

2. Develop a holistic view of the “what” of change – that is, what needs to change -

based on the integral framework of Ken Wilber2.

3. Develop a program methodology which reflects that analysis3.

1 Gender at Work’s framework is used by several development agencies in their programmatic and organizational

change work --_ For example, Oxfam Canada at headquarters and in the Pace Program in the Horn of Africa and in

Mozambique; AWID’s “ Towards A Feminist Meta Framework For Monitoring & Evaluation” developed by Srilatha

Batliwala; CREA’s South Asia Movement Building and Human Rights Institute

(http://web.creaworld.org/home.asp); Justice and Women (JAW) in South Africa is using the G@W integral

framework as the basis for the internal and external system of planning, monitoring and evaluation; they are

developing an evaluation tool based on the framework and the G@W approach; AWID’s Feminist Movement

Building Program is translating segments of Change is a Slow Dance into French and Spanish to distribute to

members; the document has been included as part of AWID’s updated library; Numerous requests from academic

institutions to develop a module presentation for use in an academic setting – for example, three-hour seminar

for adult education diploma students in South Africa, mostly from community organizations, schools,

corporations, etc., on gender and organizational change, especially with regards to power relations; Earthscan

reader in NGO Management re-published an article that was first published in Gender and Development entitled

"Is there life after gender mainstreaming?" by Aruna Rao and David Kelleher; In Southern Africa, SAfAIDS, in

partnership with Seke Rural, implemented a pilot project in Zimbabwe in which Community Dialogues were used

to address harmful cultural practices, profiling G@W’s methodology on page 30 of their training handbook on

gender, violence and HIV/AIDS. They have also created the poster (clearly drawing on the G@W framework).

2 Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, Shambhala, 1996.

3David Kelleher, Action Learning for Gender Equality, Gender at Work, 2009

(http://www.genderatwork.org/learning-centre); Michel Friedman and Ray Gordezky, A Holistic Approach to Social

Justice, Presentation to the International Organization Development Association, 2010, (www.genderatwork.org)

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In the last plan period we have:

4. Implemented our program methodology in a wide range of organizations and settings

around the world: we have successfully completed organizational strengthening

programs with 8 organizations in South Africa, 8 organizations in East Africa; 5

organizations in India and 6 organizations in the Horn of Africa

5. Developed and have begun implementing the Dalit Women’s Accountability Initiative

(2010-2011) in India in partnership with Dalit Stree Shakti, a Dalit women’s union in

South India, and with funding from the UNIFEM Gender Equality Fund

6. Applied our understandings of gender and institutional change in designing programs

and assessing institutional features of global organizations such as UNIFEM in their

Gender & Democratic Governance Program, the Swiss Development Corporation, the

United Nations Development Group, and a set of development finance institutions

including CDC, FMO, IFC and Norfund. In addition, several international and national

organizations (e.g. Oxfam Novib’s GMLT Program, Oxfam Canada, The Global Fund for

Women, SAfAIDS in South Africa and SPARC in Mumbai) are using the Gender at Work

framework for program design, training of gender and organizational change

facilitators, and program evaluation.

7. Expanded our pool of Associates and Facilitators and held an Associates and

Facilitators Capacity Building & Reflection Workshop in Canada in April 2009

8. Developed and disseminated several new publications through our website; this

includes analytical papers and several short stories.

9. Re-vamped our web site; daily visits to the site have since doubled and monthly visits

have increased by at least 160% since Oct 2009 - on average 16,000 to 28,000 hits per

month. Recently, we have added social media - Facebook and Twitter - to the site as

well as member’s space.

10. Implemented a new organizational and staff structure by hiring an Executive Director

and a part-time financial manager; we have also formed an Executive Committee of

senior Associates who regularly meet by telephone to guide the management and

work of the organization.

As elaborated in our last Strategic Plan, our niche is defined by “our commitment to tackling the

hardest part of transforming power: changing the rules of society – especially unwritten norms,

values and behaviors that are complicit in prolonging inequalities, by working through

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organizations.” Our partners report that we are asking the key questions about cultural norms

and root causes of inequalities. Because our work is done over time and is rigorous but non-

prescriptive, our processes encourage partners to find out for themselves what they have to do

and allow transformational process to take root. In trying to understand each organization in

its own terms, we allow recognition of their virtues and values and surface what is not fully

explicit in the organizations and what is seldom considered by external resource providers.

There are strong indications that the Civil Society Strengthening Program is working well --

participant evaluations, Gender at Work’s own evaluation of the South Africa program, Oxfam

Canada’s evaluation of the Horn program all point to good results in changing persons,

organizations and communities. The work with bilateral and multilateral organizations has also

been rated positively though in those settings tangible results are less obvious and the

sustainability of effects is unclear.

Our work is rooted in a theory of change4; the Gender at Work framework is seen as an

extremely powerful analytical tool and the processes we facilitate draw on complex systems

thinking and practice. We weave different strands of theory and practice together - feminist

theory, organizational development and change, and energy practices such as T’ai Chi – and our

mind, body, spirit approach is viewed as central for shifting power. Gender at Work has had a

significant impact in the personal lives of participants and we have strengthened the ability of

individuals to contribute to the collective. Our choice of partners and our approach reflects our

values and our politics – we invest in organizations that are key players in building just and

equitable cultures and societies; we invest in a feminist journey with mixed organizations as

well as women’s organizations; we advocate for global change but partner with local level

organizations to actually make change happen; and are able to visualize micro level changes

and link them to macro perspectives, arguments and mechanisms at the level of regional

commissions, the World Bank and the UN. Our Associates are viewed as top-notch; each with

long and varied experience and our publications are compelling as they reflect knowledge

based on practice. Thus, as we look toward the next three years, we do so from a strong

foundation, confident that we have a product and a process that works and is in much demand.

4 See for example, “Gender at Work’s Approach to Change” (www.genderatwork.org) and Aruna Rao and David Kelleher, Is there Life After Mainstreaming? Gender and Development: Mainstreaming A Critical Review, Volume 13, Number 2, Oxfam UKI, July 2005

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Where Are We Now?

Our work, framework and tools highlight gender equality. But at the same time, in our work,

we deal with exclusion based on multiple dimensions of identity: for example, race, ethnicity,

religion, economic poverty and age. We want to develop our ability to deal with these

intersectionalities in a way that is more dynamic and realistic than conventional approaches

have been to date. Currently, an individual is often asked to privilege one form of exclusion

over another (e.g. Dalit issues rather than gender issues) or a person’s identity is seen as static

rather than fluid, and there is limited capacity to transfer solidarity or learning from one

dimension of identity to another. While most development organizations (and many

governments) now recognize the reality of multiple and intersecting oppressions and

exclusions, there is as yet no consensus on how to address them. The conceptual framework is

still evolving. Methodologies and tools need to be developed and tested for their applicability

across a range of local contexts. We feel that with practices and tools to deal with intersecting

oppressions we can make our work more relevant and contribute to the thinking and practice

of a broader set of organizations and change practitioners.

Our gender action learning processes draw on various strains of theory and practice from

organizational development, adult and popular education, holistic wellness practices, anti-

oppression work and feminism. Many other organizations have drawn on these different

theories and techniques in different contexts but we believe that Gender at Work combines

them in a unique way. Our approach cannot be reduced to a limited number of elements but its

power may lie in the creative tensions it generates by combining diverse principles. The skills,

knowledge, experience, confidence and motivation of our Associates and Facilitators thus, are

the key elements which enable us to create and carry out gender action learning processes. So

far, we have operated with a very small group of part time, local practitioners in both India and

South Africa. In order to undertake more such work in India, South Africa or the region, we

would need to expand our human resources. But given the high levels of competence our work

requires in both theory and practice, identifying and mentoring new facilitators will be a key

challenge in strengthening Gender at Work’s capacity in the coming years.

We acknowledge that what we do in each situation – the Gender at Work approach – differs

depending to some extent on who is doing it. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. To

be able to adapt the ideas driving our work and apply the framework in different contexts, in

different organizational sites from local organizations to multilateral development agencies,

and for different purposes is necessary. But any diminution of the quality of the approach and a

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dilution of its key elements is a drawback. As we expand our facilitator pool, we will also pay

close attention to the quality of our practices. This will require a critical assessment of our own

work; developing a competency framework which delineates the key elements of working with

mind/body/spirit or the soft and hard skills of gender and institutional change; and then

applying that standard as a litmus test for ‘good’ work.

As an organization devoted to changing organizational culture and practices to transform

power relations between women and men, Gender at Work confronts significant challenges

when describing, tracking and communicating the results of our work, particularly because

changes in gender relations or organizational cultures are often complex, long term, and

context specific. There is an increasing tension between an external concern with “managing

for results” and the evaluation community’s concern with “embracing complexity” in evaluation

by engaging (rigorously) with complexity and accepting that results are often emergent rather

than predictable and easily measurable. Despite the difficulties, we believe that measuring and

communicating results more effectively can help us better understand how to bring about

change and make better decisions about where to focus our efforts. To become more

successful, we both need and want to improve our monitoring and learning practices. Over the

next few years, in partnership with research institutes and implementing partners, we will

invest in this important area of work.

While Gender at Work’s global work constitutes a significant portion of work and will continue

to do so, we have also grown organically in South Africa and India. Building on pre-Gender at

Work linkages with feminist organizations, organizational development agencies, researchers,

transformative leaders and change practitioners, Gender at Work began in 2004 in South Africa

to create a robust network of national actors who are transforming practices and organizations

for gender equality. Our partners are actively and strategically challenging the root causes of

inequality (deep within informal culture) and establishing new equitable norms at the

organizational and individual level. In this past plan period, we have worked to deepen four of

these partners’ work for gender justice: The South African Commercial, Catering and Allied

Workers Union, Treatment Action Campaign, Justice and Women, Women on Farms – focused

on building women’s leadership and an organizational culture to support women’s leadership.

These innovative change projects challenged power and power hierarchies from a feminist

perspective (although not always articulated in this way by partners) and developed alternative

structures, ways of organizing and support for staff/member development and leadership.

More recently we have worked with community-based organizations with predominantly

female memberships that focus on different areas (anti-privatization, skills for people with

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developmental disabilities, unionizing women in precarious employment and creating

opportunities and social networks for under and unemployed people). These CBOs from

Gauteng have forged a powerful alliance of support, learning and collaborative community

effort. Writings by these community activists and change practitioners have been interwoven

into the landscape of knowledge on transformational change in South Africa.

Similarly in India, with efforts beginning in 2004, Gender at Work has worked to build the

capacity and commitment to gender equality in mixed organizations, that is, organizations that

include both women and men. These include organizations focused on child rights, inclusive

education, women’s rights and indigenous rights. Men in traditional roles within traditional

development organizational structures become increasingly willing to take risks and act in new

ways in response to their G@W-supported analysis. For instance, MASVAW was able to make

significant shifts in gender awareness among the men in their networks (some coming from

areas of India with deeply entrenched patriarchal views), who now role model gender-sensitive

masculinity within their communities.

In both places, we have strong Gender at Work teams of thought leaders and facilitators. As

the programs gain traction and success, increasing demands are being made to expand our

partnerships and programs. Thus, both teams feel the need to consolidate and fertilize the

growth in those contexts.

We have applied our frameworks and action learning processes in civil society organizations, in

large development agencies such as Oxfam Canada, as well as in United Nations agencies. In

India, we are focusing more and more on socially excluded/marginalized groups such as Dalits

and religious minorities; in South Africa based on our track record, we are poised to work more

intensively with trade unions and with groupings of organizations in particular sectors such as

those working in HIV/Aids and on employment issues. Our work with international agencies will

expand as the demand for our approach increases. Similarly with the UN, given our success in

energizing and focusing the work of Gender Theme Groups, an area that will get increased

attention by the new UN Women agency, we are well positioned to expand this work.

Where Are We Going?

The world in which Gender at Work is now operating has changed in fundamental ways. The

financial crisis that has been unfolding over the last three years is considered by economists to

be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It contributed to the failure of key

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businesses, declines in consumer wealth estimated in the trillions of U.S. dollars, substantial

financial commitments incurred by governments, and a significant decline in economic activity.

The ripple effects are being felt all over the world. While the impact of the financial crisis on

foreign aid in general is a subject of continuous debate, we are already seeing signs of cuts in

some development aid budgets (such as the Netherlands) and a reduction of recipient

countries. As the Netherlands has been an active supporter of gender equality efforts globally,

this is a troubling sign as others are likely to follow suit. Thus, Gender at Work and

organizations like us will be facing a diminishing resource landscape. At the same time, there is

a renewed enthusiasm for growing the next generation of gender equality strategies, for

holistically addressing social exclusion in the public and private sectors and in civil society, for

social movement building, and knowledge building in partnership with diverse actors.

In the last decade, there has been an important shift in development economics from an

emphasis on growth in output toward a reduction of poverty, generation of employment, more

equitable distribution of income and wealth, institutional development, and sustainable

development strategies. The emphasis now is on the reduction of inequalities and poverty

through direct provision of facilities to meet basic needs. The MDGs, which were widely

criticized some years ago as watered down development targets which leave unchanged

structural inequalities that perpetuate poverty, now seem like distant goals. Many countries are

unlikely to reach their MDG targets for 2015 because of poverty. Equally if not more relevant

for our work, there is a far greater emphasis now on examining, understanding and changing

social structures, cultural norms, values and attitude systems and organizational inefficiencies

that limit growth and equity. Our best successes have been in changing informal norms and

relationships of power. We focus on the power relationships between individuals within

organizations, households and communities on the assumption that both individuals and

organizations can change if the relationships between them change. Methodologically, the

shift in development economics has also given more importance to the interplay between

experimentation and theoretical thinking and the importance of field based research and

practices of change as a tool in elaborating our understanding of economic and social issues

relevant to poverty and inequality.

These challenging times present significant opportunities for our work. Gender at Work has a

proven product and process that works, that is in much demand, and that can be adapted to

various issues and local situations. We also have a dedicated set of highly reputable Associates

and Facilitators. Over the next three years, we intend to grow our impact and become a more

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relevant and effective resource on gender equality to a wider range of development actors in

the north and south. We will do this by:

· Building and testing a new conceptual framework and action-learning practices and

tools for organizational transformation on gender and social inclusion;

· Developing and implementing more systematic measures for tracking progress on

gender and institutional change;

· Expanding our Facilitator pool;

· Honing our action-learning practices through partnerships with existing partners and

new kinds of organizations such as trade unions, women’s organizations, social

movements, and international organizations, including UN agencies;

· Actively disseminating our new frameworks, tools and learning;

· Consolidating our institutional roots in India and South Africa; and

· Re-organizing our organizational core to support our growth strategies in ways that

build on proven strengths and competencies.

Our Key Result Areas

1. Conceptual Framework and Practice - Gender and Social Exclusion: By 2013 Gender at

Work will have developed a conceptual framework, and piloted approaches that will

bring other fault lines of social exclusion (such as race, caste, class, sexuality) together

with gender inequality into the foreground in our work with organizations. To

accomplish this, Gender at Work will build a 2-year program in partnership with 3-4 like-

minded organizations which have experience in addressing issues of gender and social

inclusion in different regions of the world. This program will: (i) seek a broad range of

examples of ‘building cultures of social justice and gender equality’ at the individual,

organizational and community levels; (ii) bring partners together to collectively analyze

their experiences and draw out essential principles and (iii) apply these insights and

lessons to propose a conceptual framework on gender and social inclusion that can be

used as a starting point for organizational change. This work will also draw on relevant

theoretical and empirical work on organizational learning, gender equality, social

inclusion, and human rights.

2. Expanding the Facilitator pool: By 2013 Gender at Work will have increased the Gender

at Work facilitator pool. All the new Gender at Work facilitators will have a clear

understanding of G@W concepts, and the required competency to work with partner

organizations to apply and implement them. Also, we will have developed a set of web-

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based materials, workshops and apprenticeship experiences to support and ensure the

highest level of practice. In addition, by 2013, Gender at Work will create supportive

structures under which those involved in addressing gender equality can meet, share

learning and develop new approaches to societal change.

3. Tracking and Understanding Results: By 2013, in collaboration with the Participation,

Power and Social Change (PPSC) Team at IDS Sussex and together with other

researchers and implementing partners, Gender at Work will convene an ‘Initiative for

Measuring Gender Equality’ which will: (i) develop an approach to understanding impact

and results that marries a need for tracking results with the understandings that come

from rigorous analysis of systemic and emergent factors in change; and (ii) develop

ways of understanding change in organizations and social movements looking at such

difficult to measure areas as organizational culture. These methods will be also used to

understand the impacts of each of our programs. We will share our learning using the

appropriate messages and communication mediums to reach a diverse audience of

researchers, community-based change agents, and policy makers. We will produce a

document on frameworks and approaches and several case studies which highlight key

insights and learnings from specific organizations, which will be available electronically.

Lessons from our work on intersectionality will also inform and enrich this exercise.

4. Growing our Impact: Gender at Work will continue to contribute to global efforts

toward gender equality through action learning and institutional change. Over the

period 2011 to 2013, we will work with 25 additional CBOs, regional and national NGOs;

5 additional international NGOs, and also with mult5ilateral and bilateral agencies using

both the action-learning methodology with a diverse set of actors in one country as well

as other approaches to organizational change (such as a ‘community of change’

approach involving a group of actors working in the same sector/issue such as HIV/AIDS

or employment in a country or working on action learning with a set of organizations in

a region such as the Horn of Africa to assist those organizations to enhance women’s

empowerment and gender equality and to build cultures of equality and peace. Central

to this result area is a commitment to learning from each of these projects so that we

can both improve our own capacity and also to be able to speak to the field about what

works and what does not work. We will build strong organizational mechanisms to

ensure we can do this with authority.

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5. Dissemination: To date we have utilized a “broadcast” strategy by posting our writing

on our website. We will now explore more consciously strategic dissemination of our

work, including, if resources permit, through face to face meetings in regions where we

are working to engage local practitioners in a discussion of what we are finding, and

developing. By 2013, Gender at Work will consolidate its contributions to the field,

stories of change and learning in a book. Gender at Work will share our contributions

locally and regionally where we work with research institutes, gender activists and

organizational development practitioners; and at international meetings and

conferences such as the 2012 AWID conference in Istanbul.

6. Institutional Growth and Development in South Africa and India: Over the plan period

we will develop organizational structures in these two countries which will allow us to

deepen our roots, be more closely engaged with local social change actors, and to align

our work with the currents of change in these countries. This work will also closely

inform our global knowledge building efforts. By 2013, Gender at Work will register as a

local NGO in both India and South Africa with a Director and a small complement of staff

in each country.

7. Our own Institutional Development: Over the next three years we will work on three

inter-related strands of development: we will carry out a re-organization of the senior

management team; we will define the relationship between the existing organization

and emerging Gender at Work entities in India and South Africa; and we will continue to

develop the board governance function. The re-organization of our leadership functions

will strengthen the core leadership structure and will retain important aspects of our

structure. One of which is that we are a “collaborative” and espouse a set of values

related to co-responsibility and accountability. We function as a professional

organization which recognizes that Associates will develop and lead projects while

managers will support and link them. The collaborative, non-hierarchical approach is

working and is an important part of our functioning. To manage the collaborative, we

are developing a co-management structure. The key leadership functions will be shared

between Director responsible for strategy and external relations and a Senior Manager,

International Programs and Operations responsible for the day to day internal and

programmatic functioning of the organization. Both positions will report to the Board.

A third role, the Associate for Program Development and Donor Relations will support

both the senior leaders.