Dear WIN and CAWA friends and partners,

I wish you a most joyous and peaceful New Year. May we all live in a world with peace, security, gender equality and prosperity for all!
I feel blessed and lucky to be connected to so many amazing women in my life and feel humble for all you do collectively for making our world more humane.
May we keep moving forward together in our plight for making the world a better place for women and girls. Thank you for your continued support of WIN in giving all women and girls a voice in their democracy and economy.
Enjoy our New Year greeting to you.

Peace, Elahe Amani Chair, Women's Intercultural Network , Long Beach, California, USA

WIN is moving agendas forward locally and globally this year - simultaneously, AND expanding a US Women Connect ( USWC ) action network with partners from 24 other states - growing to 50 states. From our Big Horn Summit October 10-12 came the "Women and Children First" agenda for President Obama's first 100 days that went to the Transition Team on November 5th. Accompanying our "Women and Children First" Agenda was this Letter to President Obama.

We have been posting articles for action on our blog under the CAWA and Beijing issues Categories. Find your issue and tell us what actions you are taking on it! If your category does't have an article posted, send us one!

CAWA is kicking off strategic planning for our state agenda that will go through the US Women's Agenda in 2010 for a 5th World Conference on Women in 2012. WIN is a significant Node in these networks. See the Coming Events
below for the April CAWA CALL TO ACTION dates and objectives. Take the TRAIN to the Valley and join with us as we enter a new policy era with opportunities for moving our agenda forward and for restoring a collective US women's agenda.

From the Obama-Biden Administration: They recently launched a new feature on Change.gov called Open for Questions. Thousands of you responded, asking 10,000 questions and voting nearly a million times on questions from others.
Now that they've answered some of the most popular ones from the last round, they are open for questions again. Ask whatever you like, and vote up or down on the other questions to let them know which ones you most want the Administration to answer.
Get started now at http://change.gov/openforquestions

They look forward to learning about what you want to know.

Women's History Month, March 1 - 31 - Send us your events NOW for the CAWA Newsletter!

UN CSW 53rd Session, WIN will open the UN Commission on Women Panels on Monday, March 2, 10:00 am, with "Winning Strategies for Gender Equality". For other WIN sponsored panels, see our announcement, designed by Karen Lodrick for the inside front page of the UN CSW Program Booklet, at the web site by Carol Hansen Grey - with everything you need to know about a 5WCW.

CAWA CALL TO ACTION:
WHAT : California Women's Agenda (CAWA) leadership, representing 18 counties, ten policy areas from the CAWA and Beijing Platform for Action, key legislators and women of the Central Valley, are coming together for strategic planning in Tulare County, a historic region of California and the US.
As women locally and globally begin preparation for a Fifth World Conference on Women, Beijing+15, CAWA will kick off state planning following the UN CSW 53rd Session in March.
At the Friends Meeting House, Visalia, CA, Central Valley, April 3 - 5, 2009.
WHY:
1. To include marginalized women and girls' voices in state policies affecting their lives and the lives of their families.
2. To revisit and reaffirm a progressive California Women's Agenda for review by California women from the ground and from the internet.
3. To continue building the 'bandwidth' of CAWA's electronic action network through hub counties and partner organizations in California, and through e-networks in US Women Connect states that link to Commissions on Women, national and global NGOs, and.
4. To assure that all California women have a voice in a US Women's Agenda for the 5th World Conference on Women, 2012.

Put this significant reunion on your calendar and send us your agendas for 2009! ...mailto: win@win-cawa.org

Hello Dear Sisters,
Congratulations on your recent fight to get Barack Obama elected! It was a great fight for you all and for a number of us in Africa. Now the fight continues to help him perform and create the change that we can achieve. You are in my prayers. I am fine and Marie Estelle is well too. All my love,
Annette
Hon. Annette Mukabera, former MP, Republic of Uganda, WIN Global Advisory Council



Kyvana Tran-Arrigoni , born June 14, 2008, with Mama Linh and Daddy Marco
Thuy Linh Tran-Arrigoni, Former WIN Board Member



Norma Jean Hotaling
1951 - 2008
Norma Hotaling, founder and Executive Director of the SAGE Project in San Francisco died on December 16, 2008 following a short illness. Norma transformed her own experiences in prostitution into a mission of social justice for her sisters and brothers who had also been trafficked and exploited in prostitution. Norma served as the CAWA Chair for Violence Against Women for 11 years.



Lani Silver, founder, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project that gathered 1,700 interviews of Holocaust survivors and inspired Steven Spielberg to create his similar Shoah Foundation, died of brain cancer at her sister's San Francisco home on January 28. 2009. She was 60.

"Setting an Action Agenda is essential. The status of women and the well being of our children and families are in great danger. We cannot afford to waste one minute in implementing an agenda that will protect and enhance the status of and opportunities for women and girls throughout California, the United States and the World."

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Peloisi, December, 2004 , to the Women's Intercultural Network and The California Women's Agenda. Stay with us .. we can't move these agendas without you. Join or renew WIN or CAWA NOW!