Imagining
a perfect world

Women gather on Kauai
to celebrate their visions
for the future

By Trish Moore
Kauai correspondent

LIHUE -- These women have a plan: By imagining the world they want to live in, they can create that world. It's creative visualization on a global scale.

They are developing individual visions of how they can make a difference in their communities, and ultimately, their world. They gather to support each other, in regional meetings and at international conferences, partly because they don't want to hear that their dreams are impossible.

They've created an international network, Women of Vision and Action, and they met on Kauai last week.

A bunch of bored housewives? Hardly.

The founder of WOVA, Rama Vernon, president of the Center for International Dialogue, connects citizens from warring nations. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev credits her work with helping to end the Cold War.

Barbara Marx-Hubbard, author and noted futurist, was the runner-up behind Geraldine Ferraro for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1984. Delegates were attracted by her vision to replace the White House "war room" with a "peace room" that would "scan the globe for programs, technologies and innovations that work."

Other WOVA leaders include Carol Rosin, coordinator of the World Space Commission; Patricia Ellsberg, a Washington D.C.-based political analyst; Bibiji Inderjit Kaur, a United Nations representative.

About 300 women from Europe, the mainland and Hawaii came to Kauai to share their stories and their visions, and listen to strategies of how to make those visions reality.

More than 60 Kauai women, including former Mayor JoAnn Yukimura, volunteered their time and raised money for the four-day conference at the Outrigger Kauai Beach Hotel. Mayor Maryanne Kusaka donated personal and county funds to a conference program aimed at teen-aged girls.

Kauai-based business consultant Barbara Curl explains why she devoted five months to helping plan the event: "We need a new paradigm for solutions to handle our problems. The economic paradigm men have created isn't working."

Curl said that solutions to world and community problems have to be "spiritually based" and that "women hold the key" to change. "Women work from their hearts and use their intuition," she said. "They work with what's inside."

Marx-Hubbard said the "blueprint for change comes from innovative and creative solutions that are already working. It isn't something you just make up."

One of WOVA's goals is to "shift the entire mind-set of this world from images of breakdowns -- which are very real -- to the breakthroughs that are happening," she said.

Some were concerned that there was little ethnic diversity. Mostly Caucasian women attended the event.

Marilyn Wong, Kauai coordinator for a Drug Free Hawaii, worked to change that. "This is not a forum (local women) are used to," she said. "Some of the words are different and we're not accustomed to doing things apart from the men."

Wong appeared on local television to spread the word that what WOVA does "is no different than me as a mother and what I want from my heart for myself and the people I care about. We do a lot of that in local culture, but it's not celebrated like this."

Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono, who attended the awards banquet, said the conference was about "a new kind of leadership based on community and collaboration. It's the kind of leadership I espouse and like to follow."

"These women are pretty awesome with the commitment they bring to things," Hirono said. "And they do it very humbly. They are not after the power and the glory."

Phyllis Grimes, who organizes a WOVA chapter in Tucson, Ariz., said some in her group work on combating violence in the media by "praising and supporting images and television shows that are positive."

Grimes, 67, is a community volunteer and operates a business that sells health-related products, channeling the profits into women's organizations in her area.

Auntie Kapeka Chandler, mother of 15 children and Kauai's Living Treasure for 1997, was honored at the awards banquet as a "Woman of Spirit" for her work in building a community center in Hanalei.

Chandler's eldest daughter, Pua Chandler Bautista, addressed the conference at a forum led by Hawaiian women: "We are the generation that has all the teachings and all the secrets. If we don't use it and expect our children to, we are waiting for the wrong moment."