Maxine Routledge will be spending hours on her phone this winter in an effort by Canada’s largest rural women’s group to bring people together.
But it is not likely to be a face-to-face meeting or a conference. No one is funding such gatherings, said the woman who has taken on the job.
From her farm at Lenore, Man., Routledge will be working on one of the four goals recently decided upon by the leaders of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada.
The project is to find similar goals among farm women across the country and figure out how to work jointly on a lobby or other action.
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“There’s a lot of different views on things but we’re all working to the same goals,” Routledge said.
“We need to get away from turf protection.”
Canadian farm women are organized under four banners.
Quebec’s farm women are the best-funded, having access to the provincial umbrella group’s budget.
They are also among the most politicized, working for three decades to protect their legal and business rights.
Women’s institutes are the most numerous, about 20,000 members, and best established, but their members are older and tend to have interests in sewing and citizenship, and less on the business and policy sides of farming.
The smaller groups – the National Farmers Union women and the Canadian Farm Women’s Network – have clear political agendas that include unpaid work, legal status and rural day care, but they lack money and rely on the energy of a few dozen activists.
Routledge said her first step will be to contact all the groups to see if there is agreement to work together. If the women get organized, the long range plan is to try to work the same magic with general farm groups.
Good for industry
Routledge, who can be contacted at 204-838-2255, farms in partnership with her husband and son. She supports the project because she thinks it could help agriculture.
Routledge’s project is necessary, said Faye Mayberry, president of the FWIC.
Unless farmers do something, they may not all continue in business, said Mayberry, who grows grain with her husband in the Red Deer area.
“We just shipped some canola that ended up sample. We had frost in the spring and fall and got $1 per bushel. We understand others in the same area as us are even worse off.”
Mayberry tries to hold onto optimism, saying they’ll try again next spring for a better crop and bigger prices.
She is more hopeful when discussing other FWIC goals. These include the perennial need to build membership numbers and to communicate more successfully within the organization.
The group also plans to exchange information with provincial Agriculture in the Classroom organizations. These groups go into elementary schools to make children more aware of the role of agriculture in their lives.
“We’re trying to limit our focus and zero in on certain issues.”
A positive note for FWIC will be when its international body holds its triennial meeting in Hamilton, Ont., in June 2001.
About 700 women from around the world are expected to attend the conference. The theme will be “volunteers make visions a reality.”
