digital worlds

making connections

equality, gender, mainstreaming
 

Women Connect brought together a group of local and national women’s organisations within a learning community. It built their capacity to integrate ICT usage within their day-to-day practice and strengthened their ability to collaborate and influence at a number of levels. Our aim was to capacity build the women’s voluntary and community sector to use new technology and to deliver services and change.

The project created a website targeted at women's voluntary and community organisations and their members/users in England, and with the project itself was the first of its kind for the voluntary and community sector.  I designed Women Connect with Margaret Page and we jointly co-ordinated its first phase. 

Through Women Connect we developed methods for enabling and sustaining practical use of information and communication technologies  by small voluntary and community organisations, and their users, in diverse communities. Results and working methods continue to be widely disseminated and their implications discussed for use of ICTs for social inclusion of women and other disadvantaged groups. 

Methods and outcomes are detailed in the Report of Phase 1.  Phase 1 also resulted in Use and Shape the Internet: Women Connect's guide for women's and other voluntary and community organisations.  Publications are currently only available in print form from the Community Development Foundation.

Women Connect continues to be funded by a Community Fund (National Lottery) grant.

Community Development Foundation