The Creation of WFCA
November 2006
Welcome everyone to the newly created WFCA, Women For Change Alliance. WFCA was born in August 2006, after I attended an excellent, yet shocking and sobering presentation by the highly acclaimed scientist Tim Flannery. Although I profess to having been somewhat of an animal lover and closet environmentalist over the years, I like many people have been guilty of popping the pollution story into the back compartment of my brain for over 20 years. In fact I was probably worse than that, in so much as I used to discuss the issue of Climate Change and the Kyoto agreement when I lived in London, without really bothering to do my homework. I was also a huge polluter and consumer, as I whirled around the world, care of my fabulous job and its fabulous salary. However with motherhood, hopefully some maturation on my part and most importantly Mr. Flannery, I have been shaken to the core and on August 21st this year I realised alongside the other 200 converts in the Seymour Centre that night that I needed to act.
After a quick phone call to my new friends the world acclaimed NGO the WWF, I was off for a coffee to try and work out what I could do to help with the issue of Climate Change and Sustainability. Although it was an evolving process what struck me most about Climate Change was how little most people knew about it and how it is and will effect us all. The more I talked, and trust me I have talked allot about this, the more I realised I needed to provide an organisation that could improve awareness and education and most importantly provide the answers for the average person in the street.
There is allot of wonderful information available on Climate Change and how to address it, but I thought there was room for another one stop shop on what to do. I am also fully embracing women’s networks as the starting point to educate the community.
So with allot of help from my local paper, and women's networks, WFCA has been born. I now have a marvelous committee helping me and a circle of extremely motivated, wonderful women who are helping me at the sub committee level. Although this journey has not been easy, I am currently the proudest mum around. Having given birth to the WFCA, I know we will be all able to make a difference and change the world. I also want to extend my thanks to all the marvelous NGO's out there who are also doing such brilliant work with communities on climate change. I will not name them all, but we know who they are. I also want to thank Al Gore for his passion and brilliance to have brought world consciousness up to speed with an Inconvenient Truth, as well as Tony Blair's foresight to commission the much overdue, yet much welcome Stern report from Sir Nicholas, the ex Chief Economist from the World Bank. I also want to thank everyone one of you that has started the wake up call on Climate Change. Thank you all for caring. So now let's start working.
Yours Sincerely
Danielle Ecuyer
President WFCA
