APPENDIX A: Essay Entrees for the WENT Awards

APPENDIX A: Essay Entrees for the WENT Awards

Name of WENT Graduate: Chong Sheau Ching

Country: Malaysia

Name of Organisation: Mothers4mothers

WENT2001

(This initiative won the WENT Awards)

1.What kind of initiative or activity did you implement as a result of your WENT training?

The ‘ehomemakers’ project, May 2002 to July 2003, under the Demonstrator Applicator Grant from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, Malaysia.

2.Please describe the initiative or activity.

Building from scratch, a comprehensive trilingual portal, ehomemakers.net, to replace the passive website, built by volunteers, ‘mom4mom.com’; training 200 disadvantaged women to learn ICT and prepare them to earn income from home; organized four 350 pax conferences, five 100 pax seminars on working from home using ICT for homemakers and the disadvantaged; ensuring the expansion of a 2000 member network of homemakers and homeworkers reaching 6000 on the ground and in cyber membership; and managing a team of close to 60 homemakers (who have no experience in portal development, activity organizing, networking and working with the disadvantaged) to work fulltime or part-time in Malaysia’s first 100% virtual office.

The trilingual portal, (English, Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin) www.ehomemakers.net <http://www.ehomemakers.net/>, links homemakers and homeworkers all over Malaysia into an e-community, bound together by common interests in working from home, motherhood, homemaking and issues on economic, social, environmental, family and gender development. Interactive features for building a web community include a section that allows members to post for free their homebased products and services, a forum, and a buddy system to promote group-help. These services are especially useful to the disadvantaged and grassroot informal groups who cannot meet physically to exchange information. The Single Again section provides free legal advice concerning divorce, division of matrimonial property and custody issues. Interactive self-help healing exercises are being developed for those with no access to counselling services or are too ashamed to use them.

The Specific objectives of the project:

·To build an e-community of IT-savvy, environment-loving homemakers

·To provide a learning platform for homemakers to become teleworkers

·To encourage homemakers to generate income through green home-based activities

·To offer a platform for virtual gatherings and support groups for homemakers

·To construct a one-stop family-orientated information e-centre for members

·To enable homepreneurs and homemakers to trade with each other and with others through e-commerce

2.Share with us its history - how did the idea for the project come about? How did your WENT experience influence the development of the initiative?

I had been working at home writing and editing using ICT for 3 years, facing deep-seated prejudice against women who had chosen to telework. People called me ‘housewives’ and thought that I wasted my education and life to take care of my kid. So I wrote an article about the prejudice against ‘housewives’ in my weekly column in early 1998. Forty ‘housewives’ who also worked using ICT emailed me the morning when the article appeared in the newspapers (the Internet penetration for home users in 1998 was lower than 0.1 %) about their own frustrations. From there, I gathered a group of 15 who willingly volunteer to organize our first “Working @ Home’ conference. We didn’t meet face-to-face till the day before the conference.

Mothers for Mothers network was thus formed in 1998. It is a network of mothers from various multi-ethnic communities and ages, involved in women-connecting-women activities that promote the concept of working @ home, family love and women’s choice.

In its first three years, the Mothers for Mothers volunteer network organised seven conferences where issues such as materialism versus time for family life, entrepreneurship versus working for others, and taking charge of one’s life versus conformity became hot topics of discussion among members of the network.

As the key person who sought sponsorship from the private sector, I had to overcome ridicules and ignorance from men and women in senior management positions. “Who have ever heard of housewives organizing conferences for themselves?”

We did not have funds but barter our ability to generate media publicity with sponsors’ gifts like foods or vouchers for volunteers who organized the conferences as they had to spend their own money on transportation, phone, computer and postage.

The conferences received overwhelming responses. We also invited 200 disadvantaged women every conference to attend for free. Most of the speakers at these conferences were successful homepreneurs and women who worked from home in various ways and for various reasons. There were panel sessions beside information-packed speeches. The most heart-warming were panel sessions entitled ‘Turning My Life Around’, where single mothers and homepreneurs shared their personal triumphs - how they turned their disadvantaged positions around through home-based work to bring up their children or built successful home-based businesses.

All in all, the conferences reached not only mothers and fathers, but also attracted single women and men planning for family life. Retrenched mothers and fathers found the conferences extremely useful as they gathered creative survival ideas and felt rejuvenated by the ideas of self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Unfortunately, in the year 2000, we lost more than 2000 of our membership database to a core team who volunteered to manage our database but silently used it to build her dot com business. The rest of us didn’t know the value of database for dot com business then.

So we had to start anew to build the membership. And no one in the core team knew Excel or any database software. We used tables in Word to painstakingly reconstruct the database from scratch.

Overwhelmed by requests for more information and faced with economic constraints, the Mothers for Mothers network decided to compile a guidebook to disseminate relevant information shared thus far. In the year 2000, four of us conference speakers published the English version of Working @ Home - A Guidebook for Working Women and Homemakers. Due to the varying time commitments and lack of mobility of the authors, the writing, editing and translating of the book were done entirely through e-mail.

The website

In 1999, without knowing the difference between a ‘dot com’ and a ‘dot org’, a small group of volunteers including me constructed and maintained a static website for the Mothers for Mothers network known as ‘mom4mom.com’. This website aimed to meet the needs of mothers and homemakers by providing them with a platform to access information related to their needs and for networking. The web hosting provider provided free hosting in exchange for rights to use the website’s content as we did not have money. I paid for the domain name and Rm600 web constructing fees that year.

However, it became evident that change was needed by end 1999: the website could not address many of the concerns expressed by its members; the web hosting company demanded Rm5000 per year from us; and the many frustrating problems encountered by us volunteers in updating our website due to our lack of IT skills told us that we need to learn to do many of the web updating ourselves, otherwise we would forever be at the mercy of dot com. By April 2000, there was only one other volunteer beside me. We couldn’t cope and I couldn’t get the volunteer to commit more time nor improve the work quality. The web host threatened to blip off our website then as I could not afford to pay the Rm5000.

I found another web host who was willing to host us for free, did the updating in exchange of our content for its women’s portal. The former web host did not return the membership database to us, arguing that we did not have a written agreement whereby they were supposed to return the database to us. The content was returned to us with a virus.

We lost much of the content and our database of several thousand membership a second time. And learnt a lesson: don’t trust a dot com to do volunteer service; and that dot com business model then was to grab database for selling or exchanging with other dot com. A community website like ours needs empowerment of the stakeholders.

But we didn’t have any money to do any thing and no other NGO supported us. Even the mainstream women’s NGOs ignored us for they believed that our advocacy of working @ home lowered women’s status.

I was about to give up. As the founder and leader of the network, if I gave up, the network would die off, so would the dreams of thousands of women who wanted to work@ home and needed a support network.

“Why do I insist on moving the vision of the network when I myself is a single mother struggling to take care of my child and fighting for custody in the court?” I asked myself.

Members were beginning to doubt our core group’s effort in building a homemakers/homeworkers’ network as originally envisioned. I heard laughters, and ridicules again.

Mothers for Mothers, at that point, was at its lowest, unsupported and neglected because the homemakers/housewives were not respected by the society.

Then I read about the DAG grant in the newspaper. I spoke to others but they all discouraged me to write a proposal to DAG to develop our website as we did not have any ‘connection’ to the grant committees to ‘pull strings’.

I wrote the proposal any way, went to see the officials in charge of screening applications. I was asked to rewrite the concept three times, and got rejected after six months of pursuing them. I almost gave up. Then a personal tragedy and shock happened to me in mid 2000, I lost all hopes for every thing I had been doing including being a mother to my child, and building Mothers for Mothers.

After I got through the shock, grief and depression, I did not know what else I wanted to do except taking care of my child. I was a depressed single mom then. One day, the rejected proposal which was sitting on my desk caught my eye. “Why don’t I just write a totally different proposal for people like me?”

I spent the next 2 weeks writing a proposal, ‘ehomemakers’, dreaming up all the possible things I could do for homemakers, especially single mothers like me, who have little time and need to work, manage household and childcare at the same time. I put down the kind of content that no other dot com women’s portal was providing to women like me.

I took the proposal to DAG again, was asked to rewrite according to some format this time. In November, I received a letter that the proposal was approved by DAG and I were to wait for the signing of MOU with the government. I was told to start the ehomemakers project in Jan 2001. I spent December 2000, and January 2001 to April 2001, searching for right candidates for the project. By May 01, it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere for the MOU was not signed and there was no guarantee about our getting the grant. The 25 candidates dropped out for they believed that I was lying about the grant for Mothers for Mothers.

I didn’t hear anything about the grant for the next 8 months, during which I felt like giving up. But a volunteer and I still kept the ‘mom4mom.com’ website going. And I still kept writing about working at home in my weekly newspaper column, gathering members. In 2001, we published the Chinese and Malay version of the Working @ Home book with the help of other volunteers.

The WENT Path

I met Vivien Chiam of IDRC in Singapore. She told me about WENT after hearing my sob story about Mothers for Mothers. I attended WENT 01 in July.

It was there that I realized that there is such a network as WENT for women community change agents, and that I wasn’t alone. I met women leaders who worked in child sex trade, migrant rights, labor rights etc. The obstacles I encountered paled beside their horror stories. But they did not give up. They were right there in Seoul, learning how to use ICT to improve their work! And they had visions just like what I had!

Also, meeting the trainers who were mostly consultants showed me that women could indeed earn income using ICT beside writing/editing. Mothers for Mothers had been right all these years even though our advocacy was not noticed in Malaysia.

I was fascinated with c2o’s concept of template-based website such as WOK, which literally solved the problems we were facing with ‘mom4mom.com’. I was also impressed about their working @ home virtual office and how their lifestyle - enjoy a life of music and creativity and IT together.

I also learnt about the history of Sookmyung University and how it was founded to help women to learn. Its core movers too overcame obstacles to make the University a top one in South Korea. I also got to learn that there are Mothers’ clubs in Korea and that usage of ICT among homemakers is more common than in Malaysia. Learning that APC has a virtual office with members living all over the world also spurred me to envision a virtual office for Mothers for Mothers.

I was in Track 1 in WENT where I learnt the overall concept of web development, what was Information Architecture and navigation, competitor analysis and some basic portal security issues.

After I returned from WENT, I felt rejuvenated and my commitment to use ICT for gende development became stronger. I was now a member of a vision network for women. If I need support or advice, I could email people.

I was not alone anymore. This realization was powerful as it spurred me to move on with the DAG application as if I had not encountered any obstacles before except rewriting my proposed concepts over and over again! And it became a learning process for me.