Chimes of Freedom, The Times They Are A Changin’, Blowin in the Wind – it feels like we’re in a singular Bob Dylan moment here in New York with the 22nd day of Occupy Wall Street continuing to gain momentum.
I’ve just returned from (freezing cold) Ottawa and (slightly less cold) San Francisco. In Ottawa I was attending an international conference on women and economic development hosted by UN Women together with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), as well as being rapporteur, where I reporting back to the assembly. The focus was on solutions to address the situation where almost 70% of the world’s most poor are women.
Discussion ranged from the fact that women’s participation in the paid economic is not necessarily empowering as women are forced into ‘distress sales’ of backbreaking labour for a pittance that doesn’t build on, but rather depletes, their human capacities. Economic empowerment depends on rights including the right to work and rights at work. So we need gender responsible budgeting and financial systems to ensure women have better access to credit and better support for job creation. We need procurement policies that support women-led businesses — and infrastructure policies that reduce inequity. I spoke at the conference of the need for greater investment in research to inform what was happening to women on the ground – in fact at Women’s World Banking we’re planning to secure funds to create a Gender and Finance Innovation Lab in order to do just that.
The message to UN Women was that we need a new economic model that locates gender at the centre in order to ensure equity. We need to measure, value and make visible the role of caregiving. We need to create supply and demand for labour and a model of growth that supports higher employment, better use of women’s education and flexibility in women’s and men’s roles.
One of the most inspirational speakers at the conference was Bunker Roy, who is the founder and director (for the last 40 years) of Barefoot College in India. The requirement for entry to the college? You must be illiterate. ‘Don’t ever call someone who is illiterate an uneducated person’, said Bunker Roy. And then he quoted Mark Twain ‘Don’t let school stand in the way of an education’. Among the students at the college are grandmothers from Indian, African and Latin American countries who can’t read or write and who are invited to come to the college for six months to learn how to be solar engineers, and then to be paid for this skill.
Grandmothers are chosen because they are the stabilizers within many villages – they know what’s going on and they have deep ties within their community. So, their country and the Indian government pays for them to be away from their village for six months in order for them to learn how to install solar lamps, and how to fix them if something goes wrong. In such a way, villages are able to afford to switch from candles and fires to solar lamps and, in the process, reduce the level of lung disease, blindness and snake and insect bites that occur from relying on candles and campfires. Also, instead of solar lamps being discarded when something goes wrong, there’s a person with the skills and expertise to fix it and ensure that solar energy is maintained. The intention is to bring solar electrification to all of India and Africa, as well as other countries. ‘They came as grandmothers and they went back as tigers’, said Bunker Roy of the first group of grandmothers fromIndia. All these grandmothers are trained using sign language and so they don’t need to speak English to learn, and they don’t need English to develop close relationships with women from other countries while they are there. And so Bunker Roy, ‘part magician, part practical agent of change’, cast a spell of hope over the gathering. Here was a great example of women literally powering a nation – something that had begun as a local initiative had already had global impact.
In San Francisco, I joined the rest of the Board of the Women’s Funding Network to agree on the new President and CEO of the network. We were also there to have our regular meeting and discuss the work of the network in harnessing the momentum of other women’s funds across the globe in our collective role of movement building. While I was there, the Global Fund for Women had a tribute night to honour the work of the late Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and the world’s foremost environmentalist who died last week of cancer. As founder of the grass roots Green Belt Movement in Kenya, Wangari empowered millions of people to plant trees and conserve the environment as part of her broader global vision to show, in very practical ways, the connection between culture, politics and economics.
I was relieved to return to an Indian Summer in New York late on Friday afternoon. There was so much happening at WWB and it was challenging to juggle the different worlds of UN conferences, WFN Board Meetings and WWB core business. Josh met me at my apartment and we tossed my luggage down and headed out to dinner. It was a velvety night and everyone was in a good mood. Josh apologized to a man behind us for our dawdling and the man smiled and said it was an evening for dawdling. And so it was. I was happy to let everything go for a while and just be.
We bumped into an old friend of Josh’s and talked for a while before walking to our favourite restaurant where the waiters smiled and brought us drinks. On the way, we’d dropped into a Bleecker Streetbookshop where Bob Dylan featured large and we all browsed the books to his plaintive Like a Rolling Stone and I Feel a Change Comin’ On.
If we needed to be convinced that change was coming, then we needed to look no further than Rev. Billy Talen, the preacher from The Church of Earthalujah, with his very own angelic Stop Shopping Choir and a fixture at Occupy Wall Street. “We’re learning how to practice democracy live” he roared to the crowds, which by now had increased from hundreds to thousands of people. “The era of petition is over and the era of Occupy Wall Street has begun. And you know what? It’s Joyful!!”
People were flowing into Occupy Wall Street to show their commitment to active democracy. They wanted to help get the message to Congress representatives that corporate influence was so great that it was hard for citizens to be heard and this situation had to be reversed. People mattered most, not corporations, the movement proclaimed, and citizens were stepping up to be heard. Income inequality had become extreme and it was creating a permanent underclass and a new generation of unemployed people. The domino effect was less access to health care, education, housing and opportunities to plan for the future. People were hurting and their handmade signs each told their own story.
It was a very different feeling in the crowd to what Josh and I had experienced the previous week. The sweetness of a mass meditation session had been replaced by hundreds of chanting people – chanting for inclusivity, with various slogans and with police wrapped round the edges of the crowd. It seemed like a tinderbox, where anything could set off the crowd. Just one scuffle between police and protesters and the whole thing would erupt.
Meanwhile, the makeshift People’s Library we’d encountered last weekend had become a handmade replica of an institutional library, complete with Reference Desk and horn-rimmed librarians. The level of organization was astonishing. Peppered between the racks and stacks were signs such as ‘If you get arrested call The National Lawyers Guild on 212 679 6018.’ Not that many seemed bothered by this thought. Opposite the library were two men deep into a game of chess while others snoozed on, oblivious to the growing, hungry crowd and photographers snapping those sleeping.
The crowd was diverse. There were parents with kids, older people – some in wheelchairs, lots of young people, priests, politicians, pollsters, mobilisers, media and camera crews. A man with his kids told us he’d arrived from Wisconsin– “I had other things to do but it’s what this country needs now. You gotta show up.” Our cab driver was thrilled to be taking us to Liberty Central and told us that he was ex Goldman Sachs and it was time the financial institutions were held accountable. He thanked us for being there for him, and said he’d be down later himself too. Our driver went on to tell us of the corporate profits from drugs such as Ritalin, which is over-prescribed for ADHD and where the government alone makes a $450 million profit from drugs that have terrible side effects for young people.
People were connecting the dots in ways that make sense of their own lives in this movement that is fanning out across theUSand to other countries. ‘Obama, Stop Milking the Bull’, said one sign, in sync with another that stated‘Wall Street Still Not Regulated.’ ‘Jobs For All At Decent Pay, said another. Stella would have agreed. Online sites such as Facebook, YouTube, TrendMap, Meetup.com, OccupyWallStreetNYC on Twitter, and WeArethe99percent blog on Tumblr were also attracting thousands of hits, messages and uploads a day.
We passed a young man sitting down with a sign ’10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash. Now we have No Jobs, No Hope and No Cash’.
Josh and I arrived back at my half moon apartment. We sat outside and swung our legs on a street bench, watching the foot traffic as people came up and talked to us. One woman starting chasing people who were dropping cigarette butts on the street. Another came out of her shop to tell us her own story of how she came to be in the Village. Our café neighbours gave us drinks to cool us down. Storytelling, generous sharing and butt chasing were all the go. Comical faced dogs checked each other out while in front of me, in a stroller, a baby girl with the bluest eyes stared into mine. What kind of world are you stepping into, gorgeous girl, I wondered. Here, in this world, in this village, at this moment?
Jane Sloane