About Gather the Women

Linked globally by our interactive website, we invite women to demonstrate their courage to risk leaving old conformities by joining with millions of others throughout the world to celebrate women's true worth, to express shared concern for our human family, and to create and support actions that will enable humanity to live together in a balanced, harmonious and peaceful world.

Gather the Women is evoking at a profound level an experience of our own woman's worth to the world.

As women we bring life forward. We are in touch with the cycles of life and we function in a context that is deeply relational. We have the capacity to generate creative solutions that benefit all life on the planet.

Gather the Women is creating a rich exchange of cultural values to dissolve the ties that bind us to the illusion that one segment of our human family can win while another loses.

Together we women are contributing to a new collective wisdom and we are lending our strength to that which we wish to embrace. From this emerging balance is being born a new dimension of our humanity.

Gather the Women is a 501(c)(3) organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax exempt organization.

GTW Covenant of Leadership

This Covenant was developed by the GTW Board of Directors to describe the core principles and practices which will guide our work together.

• We will dedicate ourselves to the belief that each of us is enough right now.
• We will create containers that practice the form and principles of Circle, with a focus on shared leadership, shared responsibility, and shared deep listening, while evoking spirit.
• We will be honest and share what is true about our thoughts and feelings.
• We will aspire to be impeccable with our word, to do our very best, to take nothing for granted and to suspend our assumptions.
• We will serve holistically–mind, body, spirit, and heart.
• We will show gratitude and affirm each other and each women that participants in GTW.
• We will offer freely the abilities and skills that we possess and serve from a place of shared competency.
• We will serve as a global example of inclusivity, interdependence and diversity – valuing, appreciating and honoring all expressions of humanity and spirituality.
• We will dedicate ourselves to showing up fully, passionate in our readiness to serve.
• Our greatest value will be creating a place where all women can gather with the assurance their gifts will be honored.

5 Reasons Why GTW Is Different

1) Gather the Women is not a traditional organization; it has been set up with the intention to serve as an organic matrix of women and existing women's organizations, encouraging new models for collaboration.

2) We do not seek to change minds but to connect hearts. GTW does not endorse any particular stance on any particular issues; we do not seek to tell women what they should think and feel. Rather, we seek to create a space where women can explore and expand the powerful pieces of common ground we all share.

3) Gather the Women is grounded in a set of spiritual values and these values guide every aspect of our work. We acknowledge that each of our daily interactions with one another present the opportunity to live a new world into being. We acknowledge that the opportunity to bring integrity and compassion to all of our work together IS the outcome we are seeking. We acknowledge we can only find our way by staying open to learning through every interaction and challenge.

4) Gather the Women rests in the deep well of grace provided by Divine Source, with the commitment to honoring all the diverse expressions of faith in that One Being. We believe that when we can bring together a critical mass of diverse women of deep faith in a shared understanding of our common beliefs that everything will change.

5) We acknowledge that we cannot know the outcome of our work, and that this work is continuously unfolding in powerful, expansive ways we could not imagine. Therefore, we commit ourselves to following that energy as best we can in a fluid process based on faith.

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What Women Are Saying about GTW

The best way to understand Gather the Women is to experience it, to feel the energy and to explore the opportunities. Here are stories from women in our Matrix about their experience with GTW.
Coming soon!

What Men Are Saying about GTW

One of the core values of Gather the Women is balance—to bring the world back into balance by practicing the discipline of keeping ourselves in balance. We encourage both women and men to seek balance between their masculine and feminine qualities, so that they can merge the masculine ability to accomplish with the feminine capacity for connection into a powerful new form of human action.

While the Matrix itself is a place where women can gather to explore their own expression of that balance, we need and welcome the support of men who share our commitment to balance. Visit our Support GTW section [link] to find out how you can contribute to this energy. Here’s a sampling of what men are saying about GTW.

If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and  simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known.
—  Matthew Arnold, British poet (1822-1888)

GTW History

The phrase “Gather the Women” literally entered the public domain in November 2001, when the domain names GatherTheWomen.net, com and org were reserved by Carol Hansen Grey. Grey was serving as the Executive Director of Women of Vision and Action (WOVA), a non-profit organization based in California that provided a network for women leaders who shared a commitment to "be the change you want to see in the world". During the months leading up to November, Grey had experienced a compelling phenomenon: numerous women contacted her describing the same vision that we needed to begin to gather the women of the world. Though these women came from diverse backgrounds, all shared a deep passion for awakening the power of women in service of a better world.

When she continued to be contacted by women who envisioned a need to gather the women, Grey used her computer skills to set up an e-list in June 2002 so that these twelve women could begin an on-line dialogue. This was the start of the Gather the Women Steering Committee, which worked to define priorities for global action, exchanging more than 23,000 e-mails over the next year and meeting twice for lengthy planning sessions.

The Work Begins

Their initial goals included:

• Create a website which would serve as an interactive communication hub for the women of the world, where women could share news of their successes and learn from one another.
  
  
• Invite women of the world to create gatherings to commemorate March 8, International Women's Day. Women would be encouraged to create events large and small suited to their economic needs, spiritual beliefs and cultural values, posting news of their events on the website. Eventually, this idea developed into plans for a week of events beginning 3/3/03.
  
  
• Outreach to women using the basic tools of grassroots organizing with one new twist – the internet as global communication tool.

By the end of that first March event, the Steering Committee had much to celebrate: the website now hosted over 4,700 women from 67 countries as registered participants and listed more than 450 events in 23 countries. The three core Steering Committees members who staffed the initiative (two as volunteers) were kept busy answering e-mails and telephone inquiries from around the world. Women were drawn to this open container, which was described by GTW Events Coordinator Marilyn Nyborg: "We seek not to change minds but to connect hearts." GTW was launched; without any funding and without ever having printed a brochure, the movement had reached women on every continent.

GTW Congress
The next phase of Gather the Women was already gaining momentum with the February 2003 announcement of the First Gather the Women International Congress to be held in San Francisco in October 2003. The Congress took Gather the Women to the next level by creating a model to involve and connect the many diverse global women's organizations. Gather the Women invited other organizations to partner in the creation of the Congress and to bring delegations of women from their networks. Kathlyn Schaaf, 2003 Executive Congress Coordinator, could barely keep up with the expansive flow of creative ideas generated through these collaborative partnerships. “We had a lived experience of the abundance that is available when we work together. Collaboration does not divide our resources; it multiplies them.”

Among the organizations that joined the Gather the Women Global MatrixTM in 2003 were Millionth Circle, Peace X Peace, Foundation for Conscious Evolution, AYA Partners, Pathways to Peace, Earth Luck International, Spiral Muse, Women of Wisdom, Red Web, and Women Rise for Global Peace.

The 2003 Congress was a huge success, drawing 330 women from 26 countries representing more than 25 partner organizations. Numerous ongoing collaborative projects grew from the three day event.

Next Steps
Gather the Women continued to expand, drawing new individuals, regional coordinators, and partner organizations into the matrix. Each year since those initial events, International Women’s Day celebrations and Fall Congresses have continued to be held across the United States. In 2004, Gather the Women launched the 6 Congresses in 6 Continents initiative, an effort to support women leaders on each continent in establishing regional networks of women and women’s organizations. GTW has continued to participate in new initiatives each year. To date, GTW has touched the lives of thousands of women all around the globe.

Visit Our Historical Websites

	Archive 1 www.gatherthewomen.org/archive
	Archive 2 www.gtw-archive.org
	Archive 3 www.wova-archive.org

Sister Organizations

Gather the Women is the place of opportunity. It's where the "women at  the well" gain the tools of virtual reality. It's where we begin to see our numbers and our strength and come to understand that together we are, in fact, unstoppable.                                     
—  Patricia Smith Melton, Founder, Peace X Peace

One of the most important aspects of Gather the Women is our commitment to discovering new models of effective collaboration. We believe that an incredible synergy is possible when organizations doing powerful, transformational work our planetary well-being come together in one matrix—to connect, to share information and resources, to collaborate on projects.