It seems that younger women are spending their “organization” time with professional societies, not with organizations like AAUW. Time is, after all, limited and this is certainly understandable.

I’m 57 and have spent my professional life with few women colleagues, so I appreciate the networking I get from AAUW — with women from all different fields.

But pondering how AAUW is different from my professional societies, I fell back on my experience on the PDC. The volunteers had very little to say about the content of the convention. [Yes, we were nominally reviewing proposal submissions, but it was clear the decisions were made outside the committee with enormous staff involvement.] In meetings of professional societies, of course, it is the members (not the staff) who drive the content.

Perhaps the PDC is changing. But we need to change in our recruiting and a number of other areas (member development?) if we are to be the voice for education and equity across the country.

There’s a sentiment in the organization that we need to put the word philanthropy into certain lists of key concepts. For instance, the article about the strategic process that’s been distributed to state newsletter editors for their winter editions, says

For 125 years, AAUW has been advancing equity for women and girls through education, advocacy, philanthropy, and research

It just strikes me as odd to put philanthropy in that list. Maybe my English teachers spent too much time drumming “parallel construction” into my head.

Philanthropy is what allows us to make a difference with education, advocacy and research. It’s not an end in itself.

And I, for one, think we need to link philanthropy (giving dollars) with volunteerism (giving time) to really understand the scope of the effort we’ve been making for the last 125 years.

So it’s important – critical even – but let’s put it in it’s proper place.

This article was written from an entirely different context (environmental concerns, culture in general), but I think it has something to say for our process.

When normal is a moving target. Raleigh News and Observer, Jan. 11, 2007 —

[There are] two lines: the one that runs across the bottom of how we expect the world to be and the one that runs across the top of the world that we will tolerate. Those lines are constantly changing position in cultural space. …

Shifting baselines “are the chronic, slow, hard-to-notice changes in things, from the disappearance of birds and frogs in the countryside to the increased drive time from Los Angeles to San Diego,” writes marine biologist Randy Olson. “If your ideal weight used to be 150 pounds and now it’s 160, your baseline — as well as your waistline — has shifted.” …

ShiftingBaselines.org

Can we apply this notion to communicate our process? Do some still hold to the baseline of AAUW as the organization that sent them a year’s worth of program, provided hands on support from the national office, and was their only way to connect with other educated women? How to we encourage them to change?