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1. Governance of UU Women’s Groups

Is Your Women’s Organization Losing Members?

Leaders tend to fret when the membership in their churchwomen’s organization wanes. Most of us don’t welcome change—unless we make conscious efforts to do so. There are several common ways to tackle the problem:

1. Leaders may brainstorm innovative program ideas to interest women and offer new programming or offer the same programming on evenings and weekends in smaller groups or in social settings.
2. Leaders may choose to let the organization grow dormant while members become clearer about what it is they want in a women’s group.
3. Or, they may take the least common, and perhaps riskiest approach, and Call a Circle asking women who are concerned about the problem to share in the journey of finding new ways for women to be together.

When leaders Call the Circle, as women in Lincoln, Nebraska did in 1996, they are using an age-old problem-solving method that empowers everyone to take ownership of the problem and accept responsibility for future action. It is a non-hierarchical model and one with which women tend to feel most comfortable.

In Lincoln, the women’s group had been dormant for two years before four women called a circle meeting where the agenda was to find out how women wanted to be together. Nearly fifty women showed up for the meeting, and soon one hundred women had paid dues for the organization; most of the members joined the UU Women’s Federation at the same time.

The women’s group that was formed from the planning meeting was structurally different from the group that had existed in the years before. It was designed to fit the busy lives of its members, to support small interest groups that could come and go according to the changing interests of members, and it involved few organizational meetings or paperwork.