International Women’s Day
IACD is elated to dedicate our focus to women this month — we just published our fifteenth issue of Practice Insights, Community Development and Women’s Empowerment, and our March newsletter will highlight women in community development as well.
In 2010, IACD elected our first female President, Ingrid Burkett. She played a lead role in the Brisbane conference and in raising the association’s profile across Oceania, going on to do the same in subsequent conferences in the US and Europe. Under her leadership, IACD launched its first Practice Exchange and Practice Insights Magazine. Serving until 2014, Ingrid also led IACD’s work on asset based community development. A passionate advocate of community-based practice, she specializes in local and international community economic development and is interested in links between community development, community economic development and community cultural development. She has practiced, taught and researched community development for over 20 years. In 2014, Ingrid was presented with the Global Ambassador Award in acknowledgement of her international work around community economic and asset-based community development.
This year, IACD asked Ingrid to reflect on International Women’s Day and her time as IACD’s President.
I became the first woman to serve as President of the International Association for Community Development in 2010 – 57 years after its inception. I was nominated by my great friend and colleague Mrs Mini Bedi who then joined me as IACD Vice President. Together with a great board, and wonderful women running the IACD headquarters – Tara O’Leary, followed by Gill Musk and Jackie Arreaza – we initiated some positive things during that time. We started the Practice Insights magazine which is still going strong; we ran the first Practice Exchange tours in India; and we grew the diversity and representation of practitioners on the board of the IACD. This partnership of women leading the IACD made it such an exciting and fruitful time It is interesting to me, reflecting back on this time, to think about how women generally lead differently, perhaps more indirectly, more collaboratively, less visibly.
I still wonder why it is that it took 57 years for a woman to be nominated for President of the IACD when on the ground women outnumber men both in terms of those who have job titles as ‘community development workers’ and those who do the work without a title. And I wonder if we, as a field have actually fully recognised the role, the contribution and the power of women to the foundations of our work. When I read the special edition of Practice Insights written for the 65th anniversary of the IACD in 2017, and I saw that only 15 of the 65 practitioners recognised as making a fundamental contribution to building this field were women, I felt a profound disappointment that perhaps we had not made enough progress. Women I looked up to – women who have led amazing community-based movements for justice, peace, equality – First Nations women, women of colour, poor women, LGBTIQ women, who I knew had made a truly significant and fundamental contribution remained unseen, unrecognised, overlooked. They may not be the scholars, authors, orators on the stage – but they are doing the work, making the change, leading their communities into a positive future.
However, perhaps things just take time – and perhaps we just need to keep calling out the role of women, the partnership of women, the unseen work of women in the field and in field building. Reading the current IWD Special edition Practice Insights is truly inspirational and gives me hope that we are seeing a shift – not just to recognising women, but to recognising the work of diverse women – women from every part of the world, from every class, from every background. Recognising this contribution and celebrating women leading change shouldn’t just happen on one day a year. We are half the worlds people and we do more than our share of work in creating positive futures for people, place and planet – let’s celebrate that every day.
