Leadership Development Strategies For Women With Disabilities: MIUSA

Leadership Development Strategies for Women with Disabilities: A Cross-cultural Survey
by Laura Hershey and Robin Stephens

Based on research conducted at the NGO Forum and UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995, for MIUSA under the IDEAS 2000 Project of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

In this survey, more than 30 disabled women leaders from Africa, Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas and the Pacific report on barriers, opportunities, and strategies for developing leadership among women and girls with disabilities.

Among the recommendations:

Leadership training programs for women and girls with disabilities should:

• Be both practical, down-to-earth, skill-building; and supportive, motivational, affirming. The training curriculum should stress hands-on development of specific skills -- advocacy, organizing, management, fundraising, etc. The training process should strive to equip trainees with confidence and self-esteem.
• Include information about disabled women's social, political, and economic oppression -- and the analytical tools to understand this oppression.
• Concentrate on developing the skills necessary to start new organizations.
• Include cultural experiences. By sharing and celebrating disability culture and women's culture, connections and convictions deepen.
• Recognize the economic and social conditions which shape disabled women's lives, and must somehow be structured to address those conditions. Explore strategies such as offering scholarships and pre-training preparatory trainings.
• Be based both on needs and strengths of women with disabilities. Participants should have opportunities to serve as both trainers and trainees.
• Facilitate creation of enduring support networks, teams and mentorships.
• Address communication skills as a major component, including effective meeting facilitation, debate and persuasion and how to use public communications media.
• Bring in women from other communities and movements to be speakers and trainers.