Rotary Club of Box Hill Central & healthAbility
For the first time in Victoria, a gender equality lens is applied to a local service club.
Who: Rotary is a world-wide network of around 1.4 million members that are working towards making positive changes in the local community and the world. There are 1100 clubs in Australia with around 30,000 members.
Even though Rotary Clubs were established in 1905, women could join Rotary as members only after 1989. Since 2010, women in Australia are joining Rotary at approximately the same rate as men. However, unlike the male recruits, women are not staying on as members and there are less women at leadership levels.
What: The project aimed to address two gendered drivers of violence against women:
- Men’s control of decision-making and limits to women’s independence in public and private life, and
- Rigid gender stereotyping and dominant forms of masculinity. Therefore, having greater gender equality in Rotary will also support gender equality in the broader community.
For this pilot project, healthAbility partnered with Rotary Club of Box Hill Central (RCBHC) in a co-design process to develop a gender equality framework for RCBHC to:
- showcase what they are doing well already, and
- what can be done further to strengthen activities towards gender equality.
The initial work of building a solid partnership and progressing the work took some time due to the fact that gender equality nor prevention of violence against women was not a common theme for the club members. This challenge was overcome by arranging some capacity building workshops on gender equality and having a few meetings with the leadership on what the work should look like. This work also reflected the fact that building good partnerships take time and effort.
Once a good partnership was built with the two organizations, a reference group was created for the codesign process. The advance gender equality reference group consisted of seven members - both men and women. The group would meet once a month with the healthAbility team to develop a framework for Rotary Clubs using a codesign approach. The group was very keen to learn as we progressed and lot of expertise was shared among the group.
The framework has been shaped by Rotary International’s Framework for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, informed by the Rotary Club of Box Hill Central Gender Equality Advocacy Group and reflects a whole of club approach.
This framework is designed to be practical, and consists of four critical aspects of a club’s operations:
- Communication
- Governance - Strategic planning and leadership
- Membership and participation
- Projects and events.
The Framework also identifies best practice benchmarks that clubs can strengthen towards gender equality.
Next Steps: Is to pilot it with RCBHC, with healthAbility continuing to lead and support throughout the pilot phase.
Once it is piloted the learnings, experience and resources will be shared with other Rotary Clubs within the cluster or district to further support gender equality across all clubs through Rotary club networks.
Website: healthAbility
Website: Rotary Club of Box Hill Central
