Letter to our readers
ISIS is celebrating its tenth birthday in 1984, and the ISIS Women's International Bulletin will be eight years old on 8 March 1984. ISIS has grown tremendously over the past ten years.
We started out as a small group of women convinced of the need for an international communication channel among women and women's groups in different parts of the world,
especially to build networks among the many new groups and organizations springing up in the women's movement. Coming from different countries, we wanted to share information, resources, and experiences with each other and with other women. We especially wanted to help promote two-way communication among women from developing countries and industrialized ones.
The more we talked to women in different countries about the idea, the more enthusiastic we became. Although we did not have any financial resources, to begin with, we took the initiative to create those communication channels. And so ISIS was born.
We began by gathering resource materials and contacts - which over the years have grown to over 10,000 contacts in 130 countries of the world and thousands of magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, booklets and other materials produced by women, all concerned in some way or another with our situation as women.
We've spent a lot of our time over the past ten years building the information service by answering your letters, putting women directly in touch with each other. The publications - ISIS Women's International Bulletin and the Resource Guides — have been our way to share this information much more widely, to focus on issues of burning concern to women, and to inform women about what resources are available where. We've concentrated on making available information which is not to be found through the mass media.
As ISIS has grown with the women's movement, we have searched for more ways to build these links among us and strengthen each other in our work. One way has been the Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange Programme, which this Bulletin is all about. In 1983, we had a first exchange of twelve women from groups in eight different countries, who came to Geneva for a two-week orientation course and then went to spend three months working with women's groups in other parts of the world. This experience was so fruitful that we feel it important to continue and build on it.
Another way we are expanding communications possibilities for women is through nonwritten means like audio-visuals, which are becoming more and more accessible and relevant to women. We want to give much more attention to this aspect by helping women to share audio-visual resources across the globe.
We have also organized two international conferences in the past 3 years - the International Women and Health Conference in June 1981, and the International Women and New Technology Conference in June of this year.
All of this work has been done by a small international team of women based in Rome and Geneva. Of course, none of it would have been possible without the cooperation and help of hundreds of women and groups around the world who have sent in their materials, ideas, suggestions, and experiences. But it still takes a lot of work here to compile, edit and print the Bulletins, type addresses, stuff envelopes, analyze and classify the incoming materials, answer your requests, organize all the hundreds of things to be done for the exchange programme, conferences, and the publications.
Even though the ISIS regular staff has grown to 12 women now — six in Geneva and six in Rome, these activities have put an enormous stress on us. So we have been searching for better and more practical ways of carrying out our work. From the beginning of ISIS, we have always tried to do all of the work as collectively as possible, but now that the work has increased so much it seems more practical to divide the responsibilities among us. This has already been happening to some extent: the Cross CuUural Exchange Programme has been coordinated and carried out from the ISIS office in Geneva, and the Spanish language edition of the ISIS Women's International Bulletin has been produced in the ISIS office in Rome where the Latin American members of our team are working.
Continuing in this opfic, the ISIS office in Geneva will concentrate on the Women's International Cross Cultural Exchange (WICCE) Programme and on producing documentation and publications directly related to that. The ISIS office in Rome will have the responsibility for producing the ISIS Women's International Bulletin in both English and Spanish, and for a project on women and the media, which includes the producing of a resource guide on audio-visuals for women, and a multi-media kit on using audio-visuals. All of these activities are described in the Bulletin. You will notice that, from 1984, the Bulletin will be called the his Women's Inter nationalJoumal.
To make these developments visible, we felt the need to add to our identity as ISIS a logo which explains the activities carried out by the 2 offices. Therefore, the ISIS office in Geneva will now be known as Isis-WICCE, and the ISIS office in Rome as Isis International. Close collaboration between the two offices is still of primary importance since we work jointly on developing our documentation, resource and networking activities. Future issues of the Isis Women's International Journal will bring you news about Isis activities in both offices.
We hope you will continue to find our publications useful and that you will benefit more and more from our strengthened network. Happy New Year!
The women of Isis 