Possible programs or working foci for annual conference COSROW groups
- Host listening sessions then report back to related powers
e.g. clergy candidates about BOOM; lay women about attending AC; women of color about race and gender – in their communities and in dominant-cultural locations (e.g. annual conference meeting)
- Set up a coaching or mentoring program for clergywomen
- Provide training to coaches and mentors
- Provide overall education events (e.g. at AC workshop on leadership)
- Workshop at other conference events (or as a standalone event) for MEN and WOMEN about “my new pastor/district superintendent/bishop/boss is a woman, now what: celebrating how women’s leadership is good for everyone else”
- Workshop on how men can (acknowledge the challenges of and) celebrate women’s leadership
- Recommend women leaders to conference (denominational)
- Encourage Annual Conference Session planning committee to review speaker-preacher-bishop-leadership at meeting and recommend places to incorporate qualified women (have your “binders” ready)
- Binders of qualified women for the nominations committee
- Monitoring, Desk Audit, baseline – study of women’s leadership in all aspects of church/conference leadership
- Take a survey of the existing barriers to women’s leadership (listening session)
- Systemic / policy / institutional / cultural / assumptions / attitudes / latent
- Celebrate the progress made
- Have women share stories of a time before
- Name and celebrate current places where women are celebrated (have men do this too)
- Report to AC the great things which ARE happening.
- Respond to identified barriers by recommending alternative ways of being
- Scriptural support for women’s leadership
- Historical and cultural models where women are great leaders
- Create new pathways to leadership
- Learn to recruit differently:
- Notice interested; invite; seek out missing voices; ask for recommendations
- Invitations: personal, genuine, thoughtful (targeted, appropriate, specific), generous, genuine, and relational
- Learn to recruit differently:
- Take a survey of the existing barriers to women’s leadership (listening session)
- Distribute resources, tell DS, bishop, BOOM, pastors, lay leaders, conference publications about existing great studies, books, pamphlets, websites, etc.