Women Who Go ❤️ GoBridge
Women Who Go and GoBridge have always had overlapping activities. We reach out to women and gender minorities, focusing on individually organized local Women Who Go meetups. GoBridge serves underrepresented minorities through Go workshops. We both run separate scholarships for multiple Go conferences.
We have always had the same values and goals, and have naturally collaborated and shared resources. Doing everything separately, and for intersecting groups of people when we really want to work together, is hard.
Personally, as an accidental leader of Women Who Go, it has caused me a lot of internal conflict to value inclusion, and then exclude wonderful people due to the name and structure of Women Who Go. It’s time to move past saying Women *and gender minorities, as though that fixes a name that isn’t inclusive from the start.
I wanted our GopherCon reception to be open to all the underrepresented minorities at GopherCon who could use the camaraderie, support, and chance to meet other friendly gophers. Same for our scholarship program.
Luckily I knew a few people who were already making this happen. So the leaders of Women Who Go and GoBridge met recently, imagine passing a note during study hall with “check this box” and ….
Let’s make it official.
Women Who Go is joining forces with GoBridge! 🌈 💖
Nothing changes for the Women Who Go chapters. They are free to continue as-is, or use this as an opportunity to open their chapter to a wider group of members. As always we provide advice and stickers, but have never been a top-down organization.
This is changing how Women Who Go organizes itself at a global level. We are combing the individual programs, Women Who Go and GoBridge, in our shared parent nonprofit Bridge Foundy. Women Who Go will roll up into Go Bridge and combine funds, and we will use the GoBridge name going forward. From the Women Who Go leadership, Maartje Eyskens, myself and Ashley McNamara have joined GoBridge to continue our efforts on behalf of the community.
There is a single GoBridge scholarship for GopherCon open to all underrepresented minorities for 2019 and going forward. Women Who Go will not run a separate scholarship and our funds will be used for the GoBridge scholarship. As always Ashley’s wonderful t-shirt store continues to raise funds for scholarships.
This is going to be an exciting year for all of us and brings us a step closer towards being a more inclusive, effective organization.
