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AWCF Asian Women in Co-operative Development Forum

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Home Programs Women in Leadership and Decision-Making Regional Conference on "Transformative Leadership for Co-operatives in Asia: Transforming Leadership, Transforming Co-operatives, Transforming Society"
Regional Conference on "Transformative Leadership for Co-operatives in Asia: Transforming Leadership, Transforming Co-operatives, Transforming Society" PDF Print E-mail
This Regional Conference was held November 26-28, 2003 in Bangkok, Thailand. The Conference tackled the definition, concepts, framework, features, and mechanisms of TL in co-ops; and best practices by individuals, organizations, and communities in achieving TL for the organization and society. The Conference had the premise that the new millennium poses interesting challenges to the capacity of co-ops to adapt to issues and problems brought about by globalization. As part of their responses to these challenges, Asian co-ops are evolving a new kind of empowerment for their members as well as for the community. This empowerment calls for deeper analysis of the co-op's processes, including its policies, structures, programs and services, and through a leadership framework suited for co-operatives, that is, the "TL framework."

Participants in the Conference came from different co-ops, NGOs, the government, private sector, and the academe from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. MISEREOR supported the Conference, and CULT was the host-organization.

An important part of this was the "Workshop on Transformative Leadership" where the participants formed three mixed-countries workshop groups to discuss these questions:

- What are the priority issues that we could focus on?
- What effective strategies can we use to address the issues with a transformative perspective?

The participants came up with many important points in their group discussions that they reported in the plenary session. Two of the resource persons of the Conference were tasked to synthesize the workshop results: Ms Remedios Ignacio-Rikken and Mr. Edgar Parnell. Ms Rikken is the Director for Operations of the Center for Asia-Pacific Women in Politics (CAPWIP), and a long time gender advocate and co-op promoter. Mr. Parnell is the former Chief Executive Officer of the Plunkett Foundation and a co-op leader in the United Kingdom.