Saskatchewan Christian Feminist Network

Letter to the Network- January, 2004

Happy New Year to each one of you.

It is such a pleasure to sit and let my mind roam from face to face thinking of all the members of this good Network of ours. I wonder if many of you do the same. It seems to me that when any group or organization loses the sense of the individual people who make the body it loses its sense of itself. Lets not let that happen to us.

This letter to you, which is usually written just after the November Event, has been postponed, to come to you at the same time as the Nominations letter. We hope that many of you will be inspired and then generous with your offerings of yourselves and your time. We on COG need good women (and we are all good) with our various perspectives and experiences.

November Event 2003 had 22 women gathered to learn, laugh and live together.

• We learned that a website is growing for the network.
• We laughed with joy when a planning team for 2004 came into being.
• We learned that there is a group of women interested in more political action .
• We laughed at the antics of us all at the 'party'.
• We lived in feminist community, learning this is not always easy, and laughing at our mistakes and going on to learn some more.
• We wish you all had been able to be with us.

In the conversation re political action it was decided that we would focus on how the government of Sask. is living out their promise that the work of the Women's Secretariat would not be lost when the secretariat was closed. COG has now taken on some of that work and this writer will begin that process. We will be reporting to you over the next months how that project is happening.

The past year has seen COG doing the planning for the November Event and thus losing the Visioning time that we are mandated (?) to do. We expect to do some visioning regarding the political arm that is rising and how that might live in our midst.

I leave you with this that I gleaned from the Puerto Vallarta newspaper:

• We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names, and all are different colours but they all have to learn to live in the same box.

Marilee Iverson For COG