They’ve been there since International Women’s Year, 1975. The Auckland Women’s Centre in Grey Lynn offers community education workshops and courses, as well as counselling, personal help, support groups and collective advocacy on women’s issues.
The ACE programme includes 6-7 week courses such as the ever popular Amazing Assertiveness and an intermediate Tikanga and Te Reo Māori, and courses on yoga, dance, and knitting. Then there are workshops on cv and job interview skills, girl’s self-defence and women’s self-defence.
Ellie Lim who is the ACE coordinator at the centre says that women from as far away as Tauranga and Whangarei travel to the workshops. The courses attract local women - from a wide age range and mixed ethnicity. Fees are kept as low as possible, with special arrangements for people who are not in paid work.
Ellie: “While many of the women coming to our programmes might not identify as feminists, they know that the centre provides something special for them. When we are working with women in small groups something magic happens. It’s because we have eliminated the competition that is present in mixed-gendered learning. We create a nurturing, safe space in which women can learn. They find they can be vulnerable with other women, share more and participate more.
“Often women gravitate to the centre because they have had trauma in their life such as physical or sexual violence. This is not the case with everyone who participates in courses but there is certainly a percentage who find out about our community education programme because they might have used our Women’s Support service our counselling service. They can come to a space where there are lots of visual images of powerful strong women and an organisation that has a commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi. We have lots of information here – on subjects like sexual health, general health issues, depression, counselling support, domestic violence support, beneficiaries rights and parenting. Women often say, it is like coming home.”
Like all good ACE increased confidence is often the outcome.
In 2015/16 over 3,600 women from all over Tāmaki Makaurau used the centre.
Until the ACE funding was cut in 2009 the Auckland Women’s Centre had TEC ACE funding through the allocation to secondary schools. Since then it has been a struggle to get philanthropic and trust grants and contracts with funders – but over the last 42 years the demand for a special space for women to learn has never gone away.