On a campus with over two dozen women-related organizations, gathering the members of these groups in one location is no easy task. The Center for Women and Gender is hoping to change this problem through the Council on Women's Organizations, an umbrella group for the leaders of women's organizations on campus to share what each of their organizations is doing and to work on ways that they can collaborate.
"It seems like the different women's groups are all very separate right now," Inter-Community Council intern Elizabeth Hennessey-Severson '09 said. "Everyone's talking about trying to get women to come together, and through COWO you have people meeting with the commonality of all being female. It's nice to unite them somehow."
By creating a single community base for the respective women communities on campus, COWO seeks to avoid overlapping programming that often occurs among the women's organizations, explained Kate Breeding '08, the current women's network intern who now oversees COWO.
"There was need to create a centralized place where we could all talk," Micaela Klein '10, an ICC representative, said. "Everyone's doing work on so many different levels and places on campus that it's great to have one place where everyone can tell what they're up to. If one of us is running an event, we can just blitz out to the entire COWO list, which will trickle down to all their respective communities."
COWO is currently in its planning stages for the year. It plans to create a Google calendar to list the events and meetings of the women's organizations in one place, as well as hold monthly discussions for female leaders.
"Right now we're just trying to get the first COWO meeting planned out," Breeding said. "In this upcoming winter, we're going to try to get a retreat."
The council was established last year by Danielle Strollo '07, the former women's network intern at the CWG. She held a day-long retreat last spring to discuss whether they thought COWO was a group that needed to be on campus and how it should be structured.
The retreat was attended by leaders of sororities, women's issues groups and publications, and the Inter-Community Council.
"We got a whole lot of support," Breeding said. "We have a list of over 40 girls we [e-mail] out to and I hope that the women's networks will be able to work together."
"I think COWO will strengthen the women's network, which in doing so will strengthen the CWG's mission," she added.
COWO is run through the Center on Women and Gender. Although the center sponsors a number of organizations and partners with the women and gender studies department to bring in speakers, in the past it has not played a central role on campus.
"It hasn't been made that available," Hennessey-Severson said. "It's good that the COWO meetings are held there and are actually getting people to the center. There's been talk about scheduling something during orientation to get freshmen girls involved from the start."
