of service providers to maximize their effect. Grantees include
the American Council for Nationalities Service, the Lutheran
Immigration and Refugee Service, and the National Immigration,
Refugee and Citizenship Forum.
Legal
Services for the Poor
Because the
poor often have legal problems related to discrimination, housing,
income maintenance, and family matters, the Foundation seeks to
foster innovative legal service programs and to encourage lawyers
to donate their services to the poor. Recent grants went to the
Food Research and Action Center, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law, and the National Housing Law Project. Grantees in
the developing world include the Indian Cultural Development
Centre, the Legal Assistance Trust in Namibia, and the Legal Advice
Centre in Kenya.
WOMEN'S
PROGRAM FORUM
As the United
Nations Decade for Women drew to a close in 1985, Foundation staff
began considering ways to sustain the attention to gender issues
generated by the U.N. initiative. The following year, the
Foundation created the Women's Program Forum, a staff group with
membership drawn from all the Foundation's programs and field
offices. Its purpose was to organize a variety of educational
activities on women's issues for foundations and other donors.
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With
panelists selected from donors, activists, scholars, and policy
makers, the Women's Program Forum convenes seminars several times a
year to explore issues of importance to women and girls around the
world. To date, the forum has sponsored 25 seminars and two
international conferences. In 1992, its sixth year, the forum
sponsored five seminars. The first sought to identify common ground
in issues related to gender, population, and the environment. A
second examined the image and role of women in television.
The third and
fourth seminars addressed women's issues and women's studies in
universities. One focused on race and gender in South African
universities, and the other on women's studies in the United
States. The final seminar was concerned with gender differences in
leadership.
The Women's
Program Forum also sponsors book discussions, film showings, and a
publication series. Among works published in 1992 were Violence
Against Women, a transcript from an earlier seminar, and In
Her Own Image, a catalog of films by female filmmakers from
around the world.