Working to Get Women into Office

On her frequent visits to Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America as a Peace Corps director, Barbara Ferris encountered a recurring request over and over from women she was helping.

“Women were saying they wanted to learn how to run for elected office,” said Ferris, a Glover Park resident. So she soon decided to quit her job as director of the agency’s Women in Development program to research the issue.

In 14 months of study, Ferris found that three small groups were training women to serve as activists in their own political communities.

”But there was no global center,” Ferris said.

Inspired to correct the situation, Ferris founded the International Women's Democracy Center in 1995. The training center, located near Dupont Circle, equips women from around the world with the resources and training to run for elected office in their home communities.

So far, the biggest success story, Ferris said, is “Vote for Women Candidates,” a three-year project in Botswana.

“We more than doubled the number of women candidates running for parliament – from three to 11. And for local councilor we went from 70 to 159,” said the proud founder of the democracy group.

Now, for the first time since its inception, the globally focused center will tackle a domestic project – Project Pipeline. The initiative will train American women to run for elected office in their own communities.

“The idea behind the Pipeline project is to train 18- to 35-year-old women with the technical skills in how to get politically involved in their communities,” she said.
Over the course of the next year, Ferris said, the project will spread, starting in California and continuing east to the District. Sometime next year, the center hopes to have a program operating in the Washington area, Ferris said.

Generally, the center sees its task as strengthening women’s global leadership “through training, education, networking and research with a focus on increasing the participation of women in politics, policy and decision-making within their own governments.” It is a mission honed as a result of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Ferris attended with a neighbor who also worked in international development, and Ferris used the event as a chance to gauge the interest in the type of center she envisioned.

“I did my feasibility study to see whether this would be a needed organization,” Ferris recalled.

Some 200 women from 39 countries attended the session – from “women who had just been elected to parliament, to women who wanted to run for parliament, to women from grass-roots organizations who wanted to run for local councilor.”

“And they all wanted to know how to do it,” she said.

Shortly after the trip to China, Ferris returned home to establish the International Democracy Center for Women.

Despite Ferris’ internationally flavored credentials, her Project Pipeline is not the first time she has dropped her global focus for domestic concerns. She has maintained her neighborhood involvement, serving for many years as commissioner of Glover Park’s co-ed softball league.

-- Nicole Cohen, Georgetown Current, October 10, 2001