A feminist anti-racist grassroots organization in Northern Ontario, a case study of doing the undoable somewhat well

Based on five years of participant observation, qualitative interviews with forty-one activists and a feminist multi-methods approach I describe an organization which existed in Northern Ontario, in Coldtown (a pseudonym) to enhance the lives and expand the options of ethnocultural minority women who were socioeconomically vulnerable. This organization, 'Women of the World Initiating New Formulas for Equality and Wisdom', (a pseudonym) or WWINFEW, provided social services, popular education, and skills training to ethnocultural minority women. WWINFEW had a self-help grassroots approach that utilized many volunteers from diverse backgrounds. People within these organizations always have multiple 'identity pegs' (ethnocultural, gender, socioeconomic status, family status, religious affiliations, etcetera) and these identity pegs impact on how people interact with each other regardless of what the actual day-to-day tasks are within the formal confines of the organization's stated goals. My findings are that within these progressive organizations we are attempting to give recognition to these identity pegs but we are sometimes doing so with unexplicated or ad hoc strategies and processes. I advocate that organizations invest much more time and energy into the exploration and cultivation of meaning-making, meaning-sharing, trust and faith in a long-term vision. Unfortunately, funders and other outsiders often attempt to impel us to focus exclusively on the short-term tasks 'they' have assigned and as our resources become scarce we become less focused on enhancing our interpersonal relationships and reaffirming the higher visions that originally brought us into these organizations as activists for social change. I conclude that when the organization's core activists lose sight of their vision and their sense of solidarity and compassion for each other then the organization is vulnerable to dismemberment. Funders and outsiders, of course, ongoingly impact upon us but to blame all our discomforts on the funding process is both inaccurate and disempowering to us. The process and evolution of problem identification, problem creation, and problem resolution is dynamic and dialectical. My findings suggest that although women come to work in organizations like WWINFEW for altruistic reasons, and to obtain marketable skills, many women also have female friendship seeking as a primary motivator. These WWINFEW women are depicted here in regards to both their prideful joyful sides and their shadow sides. My contributions to the scholarly literature include: a detailed ethnographic description of a unique Northern Ontario organization; an extensive application of feminist methodology (i.e. I am not only telling a story but also trying to know and feel, and thus, tell the story differently); and the connection of seven diverse bodies of information (feminism, anti-racism, social status inequalities, organizational studies, social work/voluntarism/self-help, symbolic interactionism, women's mental health issues) to each other and to this specific context.