The Women's Environment Network Australia is an organisation that seeks to amplify women's voices for the environment.
Women are the most likely to respond to surveys as concerned about the environment and represent the majority of people who actively volunteer on environmental projects.
Yet this interest is not reflected in formal decision making settings, and environmental issues are rarely considered from a gender perspective.
Our intention is to remedy this situation by supporting women to confidently have a say on future directions and provide a women's perspective of the great environmental challenges of our time.
We hope you will join us!
Board Members
Ariel Salleh is a Research Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney. She has taught at NYU; Institute for Women's Studies, Manila; York University, Toronto; and was Associate Professor in Social Ecology at UWS for a number of years. Her ideas are widely debated in eco-politics and ecological ethics. She recently served on the Australian Government's Gene Technology Ethics Committee and is a co-editor of the international journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. Some of her work can be accessed here.
Jo Tenner is a qualified mechanical engineer and possesses postgraduate qualifications in the fields of Environment, International Development, Agriculture and Rural Development. Instrumental in the establishment of the Asia Pacific Unit at the Australian Conservation Foundation, Jo has managed environmentally focused overseas aid programs. She has also worked in advocacy roles, as parliamentary liaison for a coalition of environment groups and with Oxfam Australia on the Extractive Industries Advocacy Team.
Rachel Carlisle currently works for the National Heart Foundation as the Physical Activity Manager, and focuses on the creation of healthy built environments.
Formerly Rachel worked on community education in relation to public transport at Environment Victoria. This has involved obtaining funding from Environment Australia at a federal level to continue funding Smogbusters projects, forming partnerships with state government departments and local councils to run projects in particular settings (eg with primary school children on the Smogbusters Day of Change for World Environment Day), and most recently securing funding and overseeing delivery of the Older people and Active Transport project in City of Knox.
Sue Lewis has combined a background in both science and gender, originally to investigate research questions that surround technology-based organisations and their challenge to accommodate the "gender project". This has led Sue to diverse work and study places across Australia from boardrooms to classrooms and from blast furnaces to fire stations.
Over the past ten years, Sue has worked closely on a number of large-scale corporate and educational change programs centred on diversity management, which has meant a greater focus on cultural diversity and how this difference operates in work and study places. Her current research interests centre on the social and organisational shaping of jobs and management as masculine or feminine, and the challenges that face organisations culturally when they 'want to recruit and/or retain more women'.