As women advocate for a feminist agenda, is a collaborative process more common to women leadership? If so, how do women collaborate across constituencies to achieve a feminist agenda? Our agenda in this discussion forum is an action oriented one. As feminist leaders of various national and international women's groups, we work for our associations on many projects to advocate for and to improve the status of women. Too often, however, we work in isolation, within our particular discipline or association, when collaboration with other women professionals in various fields and organizations could be a more productive and efficient strategy for change.

Thus, we are convening at the American Psychological Association 2002 with a kickoff luncheon panel to bring together feminist leaders to explore issues of collaboration in feminist leadership. We want to be action oriented. We will identify specifically how we can develop some areas and/or projects among national and international organizations for women. We will explore how we might collaborate to achieve feminist aims of advancing our knowledge about women, improving their status and acting as change agents. We hope this discussion forum will promote collaborative dialogue, identify issues, and promote an action plan.

A follow-up of our APA meeting will be for these organizations to dialogue and collaborate over this discussion forum at www.feministleadership.com over the next year. We want national and international organizations to brainstorm with us, Division 35, the Society for the Psychology of Women, on ideas for how we could collaborate? Over the past 20 years there has hardly been an area of concern for women for which the SPW has not created a task force. These concerns have ranged from ethnic minority issues to feminist pedagogy, women's health to women in the workplace, poverty and its disproportionate impact on women, lesbian concerns, equal pay for women, media and images of women, violence and abuse against women, cross-cultural issues and women's roles in different societies, women in academia, etc. Our interests are broad; the opportunities for collaboration are rich. Here are some key questions to begin the discussion.

Core Questions

• Is collaboration a cornerstone to a feminist process?
• What key areas of concern to women have your organization/association worked on over the past few years?
• Have you developed any task forces or action projects, outreach efforts and/or collaborative research? Tell us about them, their success or barriers?

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