Leadership is never personal, always collective

In this blog I, Dieke, will tell you about our second day in Bangkok! Until two o’clock that day, two of our young members attended the pre-forum for Young Women’s meeting and after that we enjoyed ourselves with some free time, to end with a choir practice. I’ll tell you some more about it, enjoy!

Today the World Council started, but yesterdaya was still a very cosy day with not more than 100 young women. Because it’s the first Council for most of the people that were present, we had an orientation to learn more about the Council.

They also explained to us more about the Young Women’s Leadership Policy. The Y has been advocating for the inclusion of young women at the policy-making process since 1947. Already at this point in the history of the Y there was a feeling worldwide that young women tended to have only a small voice in the process of deciding the policy of the Y. This initiative eventually leaded to the SGMA (Standard of Good Management and Accountability). The Young Women’s Leadership Policy should add to this with the purpose to state that every member at every level of the YWCA is responsible to support young women’s leadership, because this is in line with the goal of the Y. At the meeting they said that, for example, many YWCA’s don’t meet the standard of at least 25% of young women in the board. These are women that are aged 30 years and under (In formal definition this is what the World YWCA states to be young women). The pre-forum thinks that this should change.

After the explanation of the new initiative we broke out into groups to discuss the issues per region and also in a mixed group. What is very interesting to notice is that the sentiment to ask for more attention to help young women to development their leadership skills was shared by all regions. To be honest, almost all regions shared the same problems. For example, young women often feel that there is not a safe space to grow in their leadership positions and also that they get a lot of responsibility but almost no training to help with that.

After discussing this and finding this common ground, we also came up with solutions to empower young women and create a stronger connection between young women in leadership positions. About this I have something exciting to announce. The World YWCA is developing a new online space for young women to blog, to connect and also find opportunities to develop their leadership skills (you can think about vacancies and trainings). They expect to launch this by the end of this year.

At the end of the day we had an intergenerational interaction. This was very exciting, because great leaders of the YWCA came to the forum to have a discussion with us. One of them was the general secretary of the World YWCA. And wow, she is a really inspiring woman. This is what she said in summary:

“You are as important as any other person in the world. You are as unique. You are who you are. You are precious as you are. You have talent and skills. We are all learning, growing and leading.
Leadership is about responsibility. It’s never personal, but collective. And your story is as important as any other story.”

Very inspiring words to end the forum with!

In the evening, we had a choir practice with two of our delegation members who signed up as volunteers for the choir. The choir consists of many nationalities and also many native languages, which makes it interesting. Today we presented the song! More about that later...