Women in Leadership: Understanding Power from the Inside Out

As women leaders it can be controversial to talk about power ? how we hold it, who has it, who takes it, how it is given, how we talk about it. Many times it seems as if power is an object that is obtained, borrowed, earned, or bought. Our Winter Women in Leadership retreat brings an integral conversation about power that will help us understand power as we experience it at different levels: individual, interpersonal, organizational, and cultural. Together, we will learn to embrace the power that we hold as women leaders in the different roles that we play. Our keynote speaker: Beth Roy, Ph.D. is a longtime mediator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trained as a sociologist at University of California, Berkeley, she teaches there in the Peace and Conflict Studies program. She writes books on social conflict, most recently The Bernal Story: Mediating Class and Race in a Multicultural Community (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and 41 shots?and Counting: What Amadou Diallo teaches us about Policing, Race, and Justice (Syracuse University Press, 2008). Dr. Roy is a founder of the Practitioners Research and Scholarship Institute (PRASI), a network of conflict resolution practitioners dedicated to supporting colleagues whose cultures and approaches were absent from the existing literature to regard their lived experience as the basis of research and to write their knowledge for publication. She co-edited Recentering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2008). Our overall intention with the Women in Leadership series is to create a container that will help women in leadership roles for social impact organizations be more effective, feel happier, freer, more powerful and connected.