We are so excited to announce that we are launching a cottage training program to more efficiently grow cottages. Our Board and executive committees have spent the past several months creating basic training materials that will enable us to more effectively train cottage leadership and grow cottages. Over the next year we will be working with new and existing cottages to get feedback about these training materials. We hope to eventually develop them into an online course that can quickly and efficiently train cottage leaders worldwide.
Our cottage training program includes an in depth look at our philosophy, policies, procedures, and, most importantly, how to get a cottage up and running.
The format is text with explanatory videos throughout. Many of the videos included in the training will also be featured on our website for easy reference. One of the most helpful videos in the training is of a cottage meeting in progress.
We hope that by including video of a cottage meeting, prospective cottage leaders will get inspired about the look and feel of the cottage they will be creating. We are also including philosophy videos (also found on our website) that explain in depth each of our eight tenets. New cottages will be able to use these materials in preparing for the discussion part of their monthly meetings.
Cottages are at the heart of our grassroots movement as Big Ocean Women. We envision unified and empowered cottages meeting together all over the world in homes and community centers. We envision that through our monthly cottage discussions about our core Big Ocean beliefs and the issues in our community and world, we will feel inspired and motivated to take action together to do service, further causes, and promote policy that mirrors our beliefs. We envision that maternal feminism will find a place, once again, in the feminist movement, and consequently policies and practices that support our beliefs will find greater support. Most importantly, we envision a world wide sisterhood of women that transcends religious and cultural boundaries, working together in their individual cottages to make their communities, and consequently, their world a better place.
