Case Study: Mothers Platform Baden Württemberg
This case study was prepared for the Source Book on "Gender Responsiveness EPM" of UNCHS' Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP)

Muetterforum Baden Wuerrttemberg, (Mothers Platform) Bismarckstr. 55/1, 70197 Stuttgart, Germany , Tel: 711 6361764, Fax: 711 6369200, e mail: mufobawu@aol.com

Authors: Monika Jaeckel
Andrea Laux

Project history and main dates:

1976: Research project at DJI (German Youth institute) that resulted in concept of mother centers.
1980/81: Implementation of three model mother centers, funded by the Federal Family Ministry
1985: Publication of book "Mothers in the Center - Mother Centers", written by the mothers involved in the first 3 centers which led to the spreading of mother centers as a grassroot movement all accross the country. Opening of first mother center in Baden Württemberg in Reutlingen, soon followed by many others in Baden Wuerttemberg.
1993: Founding of the Mothers Plattform Baden Wuerttemberg, funded by the Family Minstry of Baden Wuerttemberg
1998: Currently there are 42 mother centers and 22 mother center initiatives in Baden Wuerttemberg, and the number is still growing.

Part 1

1.1 The urban environment and gender context

One way to define "grassroots" is that these are groups that are marginalised and excluded from societies´ channels of participation and decision making. This functions by not valuing their culture, ressources and capacities, they are made invisible by the society at large and in consequence are often hidden to the people themselves. What is not valued and publicly validated seems not to exist. This leads to a lack of self confidence, paralleled by a lack of access of grassroot groups to economic and social power in society, often leading to isolation, distrust and withdrawal. This - in a nut shell - is true for excluded groups all over the world.

1.2 Grassroots, Gender and Marginalisation in the Context of Germany

Who are the excluded in a highly industrialised and rich society like Germany? The overall market orientation of highly industrialised societies like Germany has excluded all those from mainstream society who are engaged in so-called "unproductive" work. Northern societies define care work as unproductive. Those dealing with taking care of children, the frail, the elderly and men, whose labor market invovlement leaves them no time for this part of life, are severely disadvantaged in thir competing power in the labor market. They fall out of mainstream society and it´s decision making channels, are marginalised and excluded from public life.

Due to a gender specific division of labor, it is mostly women who take on the majority of care work and the reproductive tasks and responsibilities in families and neighborhoods.

In industrialised societies of today the experience of motherhood is marginalised, the mother child relationship experienced under conditions of isolation. Children experience decreasing access to peer contacts and to public space, due to the increase of single child families and increasingly dangerous environments.Mothers often lack peer contacts. Parent education and outreach programs more often than not only reach a small segment of middle class families and are ineffective with others.

Our northern societies have developed social structures which avoid encounters between adults and children other than in highly specialised chldren´s islands (i.e. childcare services) or indside the walls of the family home or car. It is becoming increasingly difficult for children to move on their own in public. Streets used to be one of the most important social places for children. Today this has been sacrificed to the priority of cars and traffic. From an early age on children learn that the omnipotent vehicule is more important than their natural and spontaneous desire to move. They learn on our streets that they are the weakest part of society. They depend on their parents or caregivers, who basicly control their mobility and they stand little chance of exploring the environment on their own.

Despite the widely documented and avowed isolation of women and children at home, there is a lack of response to institutional mother-child and family support programs. Many parents have negative associations toward the school-like structures and professional-client attitudes many programs convey. This is especially true for mothers who often are intimidated by the culture of hostility toward children they experience in public environments. Very few positive experiences with public spaces outside of the family are available, often causing a loss of self-confidence and a retreat into private life.The insecurity in dealing with public life goes down the line to the children, who in turn are not introduced to the rules of public life, until they enter the rather strict enviroment of public school.

Neighborhood women and housewives are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of this isolation and marginalisation on themselves and their children and are increasingly challenging the invisibility and powerlessness being outside of the labor market bestows on them.

Because care responsibilities are neither considered as "work", nor as "qualified" in our society, concrete expertise and knowledge of family and community women, resulting from practical experience in everyday life with children and other dependants is neglected in local decision making and in public life, which relies heavily on experts with formal qualification and professional positions.

Women spend more time in the homes and in the communities than men. They use them not only as recreational space, it is their work place and work environment. Thus they often have a lot of practical knowledge about how urban infrastructure and housing should look like to meet the requirements of the main users, women, children, youth, the frail, the elderly, all those who do not spend the main part of their lives in corporate settings and the work world.

Grassroot women are involved in building and sustaining communities and from this have a keen knowledge of what is needed in the built environment, the local infrastructure, the design of public services and the development of their communities.They know what it feels like to have to go through a dark underpass to get home, to cook meals for 5 persons in a small kitchen, or to stow away a bicycle in the basement while the waiting toddler spills the contents of the shopping bags into the hall. They know about the effects of a society not welcoming and not incorporating children into public life on the confidence, vitality and development of their children.

Western and northern societies have developed a culture, where there is a huge schism between public/political and private/community life. Going into politics - on all levels, including local governance - in northern societies usually means disconnecting from the communities and from everyday life. One of the main barriers to grassroot participation in politics and local governance is that grassroot women do not disconnect from, but rather are fully rooted in everyday life and the daily needs of their families and communities.

Childcare should be an obvious part of political infrastructure, just like meeting rooms, chauffered car parks, telephones, computers and technical equipment, which are considered necessary and are generally provided to hold political meetings and conduct political decision making. That childcare is not included shows that people involved in the political process are clearly not expected to be personally involved in taking care of children.

Children are cared for on the other side of the fence of public life, on the „dark side of the moon“, the side never seen in public, the side, however, grassroot women are connected to. If seriously interested in involving the expertise and knowledge of grassroot women in local governance and decision making the corporate culture of decision making procedures needs to be adapted to the daily life needs and culture of community women, to their communication styles and ways of dealing.

1.3 Key objectives

The Muetterforum (Mothers Platform) is a network of mother centers in the region of Baden Wuerttemberg, Germany, addressing the marginalisation of housewives and community women and supporting their reentry into public life, not primarily via the traditional feminist routes of professionalisation and labor market participation, but by creating direct channels to increase the participation of community and neighborhood women in local politics and community planning and development, with special focus on the needs and views of families and children, based on their everyday experience.

The focus is on the quality of human settlements and habitat not only as a built environment, a flourishing economic market and an efficient transportation system, but as a community involving family life, social relationships and "social capital".

The objective is to create visibilty, validation and equity for the work women are taking on in the family and in the communities and for the competences and expertise developed in this "other side of life" so that they can be included in the problem solving and decision making processes in the community. Major ressources and expertise are wasted by not consulting with users at the grassroot level and by not considering their daily life experience as qualification.

What is needed for good partnerships is that the grassroot women are perceived as experts and invited to the table on equal footing. Professionals are often in the position to open doors for grassroot women and provide them with insider information and knowhow. It is very important th
The objective of the mother centers is to create such meeting points in the communities, where everyday expertise and competences of community women can be pulled together, consolidated and channelled into community decision making.

The objective is also to raise the status of children in society, to counteract their exclusion from public life and public culture, to raise the priority with which decisions about resources and public expenditure and the provision of services are directed towards improving the living conditions for families and children.

Sustainability of human settlements depends on the quality of life and upbringing for children. They are our future.

Part II: Local Experiences with a gender responsive EPM Process

2.1. Creating Mother Centers

Mothers often describe a "trap" they fall into when having children and living a life, which demands different rhythms and priorities than those constituting public norms. On the one hand mothering demands an incredible growth of responsiility, competence and self-reliance. On the other hand, they are cut off from public values, which are based on earning money, on principles of success and competition and (fulltime) labor market participation.

In the mother centers women break through the isolation they experience in our culture when they have children and become "deviant" from the dominant male life style, around which society and public life is organised: fulltime avalability for the labor market, and leaving family obligations up to others. Most women do not follow this male life pattern.

In the mother centers public visibility is created for female life styles. The name itself is a validation of women´s contribution to society. They are places to make visible both the needs and strengths of family life. The centers open up the private home-sphere and the mothers learn to use more social and public space both for themselves and for their children. They create new balances for reconciling familiy life and public activity and offer a place for women to envision and demand a world that is more accomodating towards children, women and families.

Mother centers are places where women organise without being clientalised. Women experience themselves as experts on family and community life, supporting each other on a peer level in creating problem solving strategies for themselves and their environment.
They challenge the exclusion of children from public life, which is one of the greatest factors contributing to the exclusion of women from public leadership and decision making.

The core of the mother centers is a daily drop-in coffee shop including childcare. A lot of peer learning happens around the coffee table in the mother centers. The approach is not a social work approach: professionals saying: "If you have a problem, come to us, we can help you."

It is an empowerment approach: neighborhood women saying: "We have a place here where you can relax, where we can talk, where you can find out and focus on what your needs are as well as what you are good at and on how we can join together to get what we want." One principle of the mother centers is: "Everybody is good at at least one thing - and you can contribute this one thing (and more) here."

The centers create a plattform to bring the resources and talents of women who stay at home while their children are small out of the confined area of private homes back into the community and into society.

Activities in the centers include:

- Knowhow on parenting (i.e. breast feeding, nutrition, what do I do when a chid doesn´t stop crying etc);
- Courses like language courses, computer courses;
- Capacity building like public speaking, conflict resolution, fundraising, public relations;
- Relaxation and holistic health services like reflexology, massages etc;
- Job training and job creating like self employment and small businesses
- Advocacy groups on issues like children´s environmental diseases, single parenting etc;

How do the centers come about?

The mother centers are a self-help movement. Local groups of women hear about the idea or about an existing mother center nearby and say: "This is it!" and "We can do that too!" They usually visit a mother center in their area or the Mothers Platform in Stuttgart and receive information and a "starters package", compiled by the Mothers Platform, containing guidelines about how to go about founding a mother center in their community. They then look locally for rooms and political and financial support to start their center. When they have existed for a year, they can apply for regional funds supplied by the Social Ministry of Baden Wuerttemberg. The Mothers Platform looks at the applications and recommends funding, if they comply with the main concept points described above.

An important part of the activities of the Mothers Platform Baden Wuerttemberg is to support the existing and help initiate the founding of new mother centers in the region, to help with their fundraising, to provide capacity building and training programs, consultation, coordination and technical assistance and political advocacy to the 42 centers and 22 initiatives that presently belong to the regional mother center network.

2.2. Allocation of funds

Mother centers are an innovation in the field of social welfare and social work in that they are projects developed from the bottom up, by the women involved.Social services are usually organised on a professional and institutional basis, the alternative being voluntary work of selfhelp groups (as they are called in Germany). Traditional social work and social services treat mothers and families as clients in need of professional help. Money goes to the professionals to provide the services.

The mother centers are a grassroot approach not involving professional social workers, however they do involve funds. The work of the mothers in the centers is remunerated. Mainly on a per hour basis. This is a very difficult concept to fit into the funding regulations of social welfare programs, which require professional qualification for funding spent on "staff".

In the mother centers "the staff" are the mothers themselves and their qualification comes from their everyday involvement in family and neighborhood tasks.

It took years of tough negotiation to adapt legislation and funding procedures to include the remuneration of grassroot work. And the process is not over. In many municipalities it is still very difficult to receive funding for the work hours the mothers put into the centers. Funding is often limited to subsidising rent, equipment, office facilities etc. This is also true for donations coming from the private sector. The money to pay for the work in the center is usually raised by the income producing projects of the centers (coffee shop, secondhand shop, haircutting etc).

A major accomplishment of the Mothers Platform Baden Wuerttemberg has been the allocation of funds from the regional government, who created a new title to support mother centers. This has involved major innovation in legislation and funding regulations to allocate funds to the grassroot level (family selfhelp groups) and to remunerate and acknowledge the qualification of women´s work outside of professional channels.

Channelling resources to go directly into the hands of grassroot women´s groups as in the case of the mother centers, who do not have professional staff, effected a shift in german youth and family welfare policy.

2.2. Political Advocacy

Currently the Mothers Platform is involved in a major publicity campaign confronting the issue of the poverisation of families.

The German tax and social security system is designed in a way that discriminates against families, creating heavy economic burdens for families with children. Couples with children have a loss of income over a time period of 20 years of one million DM in comparison to couples without children.Having children is currently one of the largest poverty risks in Germany. Approximately 5 million children in Germany are living in poverty. 70% of single parents live off an income under $850 per month.

The Mothers Platform Baden Wuerttemberg in cooperation with the National Association of Mother Centers have initiated a wide campaign against this "everyday life scandal" in one of the richest countries of the world. Eye catching ads were designed and sponsored by one of the best advertisement companies of the country and were placed as full page ads in major german magazines (i.e. Der Spiegel, Stern, Brigitte). This being election year in Germany the media cooperated in this campaign by sponsoring the publication of the ads.

In the city of Stuttgart, the capital of Baden Wuerttemberg, the ads are planned to go up as posters all around the city before elections. Also they are being printed in a quarter of a million copies as postcards to be distributed nationally in pubs and restaurants.

The organisation of this campaign has been a good experience of a productive partnership with groups coming from very different sectors and cultures of society, the grassroot housewives and community women on the one side and the "glossy" and "yuppie" world of advertisement and the media on the other. This crosscutting over different segments of society proves to set free an enormous potential of synergy.

2.3. Local Governance and Urban and Environmental Planning and Development

The Mothers Platform coordinates the community planning activities of the mother centers in Baden Wuerttemberg and represents them in planning and development councils and programs, thus creating channels of participation for community women which did not exist before and which are usually not foreseen and included in local governance procedures.

Creating direct channels for grassroot participation in planning and development programs improves gender equity in decision making by including a group of women that usually are excluded from public decision making.

Mothers are often highly aware of the consequences of political decisions in fields like transportation, architecture and environmental policies on the lives of children and families. However this knowledge is often devalued and not accessed in society because it is developed outside of professionalism and the labor market. Making these competences visible, re-owning them collectively, and re-integrating them into local governance is the agenda of the mother centers.

The Mothers Platform Baden Wuerttemberg has helped create new plattforms, forms of lobbying and new channels of participation for community women by supporting the local community participation actions of the local mother centers conerning the Habitat II Agenda and the Agenda 21, by lobbying for mother centers to be recognised as grassroot partners in local policy making and representing the mother centers in environmental planning and management councils.

Some of the issues to which the mother centers have contributed practical knowledge and expertise include: Municipal childcare, playgrounds, safety in urban environments, community recreation assets, green belts in the community, youth programs, municipal family policies, environmental health issues, housing and development of residential areas.

In the following we present examples of issues addressed and changes affected by the participation of the mother centers and the Mothers Plattform.

2.4. Including neighborhood women in planning and decision making councils

The local mother centers and the Mothers Plattform over the years have been recognised as a grassroot political voice and partner in urban planning and development and in familiy policy. By representing the mother centers community women have won access to family and youth welfare councils and municipal decision making bodies. This includes committees like the agenda 21 (Freiburg, Friedrichshafen, Stuttgart, Schrammberg), forums on raising the quality of life for families and children (Reutlingen, Salem, Rastatt), urban planning and urban development councils (Esslingen, Stuttgart, Reutlingen), family and youth welfare committees (Baden Baden, Stuttgart), as well as seats in district and municipal government (Reutlingen, Biberach, Schrammberg).

The experiences of the mother centers in the traditional commissions and institutional procedures is that it is often very time consuming, (often a lot of time is wasted with polishing profiles rather than creating solutions), and that to be heard and taken seriously it is better not to go alone, but to be at least two representing the mother centers. The presence of the grassroot women often changes the political atmosphere of the meetings. "Reality" is in the room, debates involve more concrete examples, it is harder to keep up a style of "talking about" rather than "talking with" the users.

In some instances new forums of dialog have been created that prove to enhance cooperation and collaboration: The women in Schrammberg have created a monthly "political forum" in the mother center that is visited by local politicians. In Leinenfelden Echterdingen mother center women meet once a year with the mayor to debate what is going well for families in the community and what is not, and three times a year with the local politicians from all parties to debate the current issues for women, families and children.

In Salem the city council refers any inquiries or requests they are approached with that concern the situation of women, families and children to the local mother center to review. If the mother center confirms the relevance and legitimacy of the issue, it is taken on the city council agenda.

In Rastatt a clearing house for community women´s issues was initiated, where any woman from the community can voice her concerns.

The role of the Mothers Platform is very crucial in developing these channels of grassroot participation in local governance. The Mothers Plattform creates a space, where the local mother centers can exchange their experiences in dealing with local authorities and can ask questions about concepts they don´t understand, procedures they find mystifying, or simply about terminology they are not familiar with. It is important to have an "own turf" that is not intimidating, where any "stupid question" may be asked, where procedures can be made transparent, strategies and points of entry can be clarified, as well as disappointments aired, and encouragement and reassurement supplied.

The Mothers Platform plays an important intermediate role in the translating of different use of language, ways of thinking and ways of approaching issues between the community women and the local authorities.

2.5 Introducing childcare as a necessary part of political infrastructure

When the women from the four mother centers in the city of Stuttgart were invited to present their project with stalls and written material at an all day exhibition of local women´s projects in the city hall, they went - as always- with their children. This - as always - was not foreseen by the organisers. There was nothing there for children. The mothers, used to improvising, quickly organised some blankets, carpets, cushions, toys, and a mobile coffee table and created their little "mother center" right in the city hall. Needless to say, they received a lot of attention and publicity and the idea of what mother centers are about was conveyed without a lot of words.

Taking children if necessary along to meetings is a common thing for mother center activists, meetings in the town hall and with the city council are no different. Local authorities, however, mostly do not have this experience. Therefore the Mothers Plattform made it a point to demand childcare whenever mother centers are invited to meetings of the city council or the regional government. Now childcare is provided on request inside the administrative buildings during political meetings.

This model has also translated to other public arenas. The mother centers are increasingly called on by companies or public agencies to provide childcare for public events like conferences, art festivals etc. It is now turning into a possibility for the mother centers to create a new buisiness.

2.6 Improving children´s playgrounds

Many of the activities and initiatives the mother centers are involved in relate to the needs of children. The availabilty and the quality of children´s playgrounds is a big issue in urban environments. Playgrounds are often far away, or not there at all, or very uncreative and boring for the children. When children´s phantasy and curiosity is not captured by the design of a playground, they easily lose interest, tend to get restless, quarrelsome, fight with other children over toys etc. In Esslingen, Baden Baden, Heubach, Leinenfelden Echterdingen, Stuttgart and Salem mother centers were active in initiating and designing playstreets for children and children´s adventure playgrounds, creating a lot of room for children to encounter nature, to invent their own toys and design their own games. In Baden Baden the mother center was central in initiating a „playground council“, that monitors and evaluates the state of all municipal playgrounds.

2.7 Improving childcare services

In Stuttgart, Freiburg, and Baden Baden the mother centers were influential in making municipal childcare programs more flexible and responsive to the needs of families. This includes other opening hours as well as a wider range of services, including emergency childcare programs, childcare for children under three and for school children.

In the city of Stuttgart the mother centers were influential in creating a planning committee on the childcare services that evaluated the local situation and introduced new concepts that were more responsive to the needs of the surroundings. By introducing the concept of aged mixed groups and a wider range of ages (from 0-14), the provision of childcare can be more closely matched to the demand in the different sections of the city. The private and public childcare providers in each area now also make their admittance procedures transparent and pool their services, so that the matching of supply and demand can be optimised in response to the immediate community.

In addition a model project was initiated to introduce flexible chldcare services, including longer hours in the evening, childcare services also on weekends and the possibility of making use of childcare provisions on a part time basis, i.e. for three days a week or for a limited number of hours per day.

Including a café and meeting point for mothers as part of the services of childcare centers is a further important innovation influenced by the mother centers.

2.8 Family friendly regeneration, planning and construction of residential areas

In Esslingen and in Stuttgart mother centers are involved in urban planning and development programs of residential areas.

Following the reunification of Germany many US army bases were vacated as a result of the reduction of US troups stationed in Germany. In Stuttgart the local mother centers are involved in replanning these residential areas, with a focus on creating neighborhood networks and intergenerational meeting points as an integral part of the community infrastructure.

Two model projects in the West and in the South of Stuttgart combining a mother center, a childcare center, small shops, a second hand store, family friendly services, housing for the elderly, eldercare services and a café are in planning to create a lively intergenerational meeting point in the community.

In planning the construction of new housing the mother center women stress issues like the importance of creating larger and open kitchens, flexible walls to adapt to changing needs in relation to different phases and life cycles of families, good lighting in halls and transparency of footways to increase security for women, and the importance of involving future residents in the planning and designing of buildings and services of residential areas.

In Esslingen the major issue the mother centers have addressed in the plans for regenerating the "Weststadt" has been to include a family friendly childrens playground. The original plans located a playground very far away from the residental area. They have managed to alter the location and to install a working group: "Women and child friendly planning in the Weststadt."

2.9 Building Neighborhoods and Communities

Many mother centers are also involved in projects to strengthen neighborhood relations and networks. These projects focus on intergenerational activities (Stuttgart, Mannheim, Esslingen) and on contacts and cooperation with ethnic minorities (Salem, Esslingen).

In Mannheim the local mother center negotiated with the city councel to turn a Pavillion left over from a former national garden exhibition in the city park into an intergenerational neighborhood center.

In Stuttgart the mother centers changed the communicative mood of a neighborhood simply by changing the way the benches in the local park were arranged. Instead of placing them side by side they were set facing each other with a table in the middle, which is much more inviting for communication and contact.

2.10 Environment, Mobility and Safety

Activities of the local mother centers are also directed towards improving the safety and the quality of the living environment. In Heubach the mother center lobbied for a new system of lighting in the community. In Leinenfelden Echterdingen the mother centers were part of a local coalition opposing the expansion of the trade fair premises and the extention of the fast train tracks.

In Reutlingen the local mother center took the mayor on a „walk through town“ to look at the community „through the eyes of women with children at their hand“. They pointed out places that were inaccessible with childrens buggies or were dangerous for children and initiated improvements including the installation of red lights at dangerous crossings, pedestrean lanes, and of family friendly parking spaces.

In Stuttgart the mother center lobbied for the redirecting of a crossing that was very dangerous for children. Several children had been killed in accidents, due to the fact that cars tended to race through, since the green lights were adapted to each other and set in a straight line. By shifting the lights cars had to slow down and the situation was deescalated.

In Friedrichshaven the mother center did a study on child friendly locations in the region and published a well received booklet called „on the road with children“, including many suggestions for excursions and recreational activities for families.

2.11 Close to Home Services for Families

Mother Centers have been innovative in creating and providing new services for families, closely tailored to their everyday needs. Being close to the users, the services offered by the mother centers often can fill in the gaps and deficits of traditional professional service provision.

The quality of these services is often increased by the fact, that they are offered inside the framework of neighborhood relationships and networks, which often prove to be more flexible and person oriented than the bureaucratic structures of institutions.

The mother centers have created services like the Babysitter Referral Service that responds to the needs of parents for childcare outside of the fixed hours provided by public childcare programs. Parents often need childcare at unduly times, i.e. on weekends, on evenings or sometimes even over night, i.e. when the mother has to go to another town for training.

Public childcare is lacking in Germany mainly in the early years and for school children. The school system in Germany is a half day system, not including midday meals. This is a great problem for working mothers who are dependent on patchwork arrangements with neighbors and relatives or have to leave their children on their own after school until they return home from work. Most mother centers provide childcare like toddlers groups, midday meal services for school children and after school programs to fill these gaps.

The added value of the childcare provision in the mother centers is that children are not confined to their groups or to any program, but can usually move around in the whole premises of the mother center as they please, joining the adult activities of the center if they wish. This is made possible by the concept and philosophy in the mother centers that children are welcome in the whole house and that all adults feel responsible for any child they encounter on the premises. The atmosphere in the whole center is one where children are made to feel welcome, where they are not excluded, where a basic value is to have time for children.

Another mother center service for families is the biologically grown food coop addressing the issue of healthy nutrition for families and children. Many mothers do not buy organic food, because it is more expensive than the products at the super market. The food coop in the mother center make it possible to provide biologically grown food at super market prices.

Providing meals at the center and also on a take out basis also gives the mother centers the opportunity to role model tasty and inexpensive recipees using fresh foods instead of canned or frozen products.The mother center food coop also provides mothers with practical suggestions on healthy food habits in everyday life, i. e. healthy snacks for school children, diets for children with nutritional disorders and allergies or healthy and not time consuming recipees for family festivities.

Part III Assessing Local Experiences: Lessons learned for the Future

3.1 Conditions for Empowerment

In the mother center experience the following elements contribute to the empowerment of grassroot women:

- Grassroot women can be activated when politics connect to their private lives and to their neighborhoods and the community they live in. They are less driven by the wish to achieve political hegemony or to excercise power, but are motivated by the wish to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones, they fight, in essence for the reproduction of life. In the mother centers women do not have to change their priorities of caring for their families in order to take part in public life. They do not have to leave their families and neighborhoods and they do not have to dispose of their children.
- The women are not approached by relating to their problems and „deficiencies“, but by relating to their strengths and talents, capacities, ressources and positive visions.
- Remuneration is important when activiating women. To gain access to some independent money is a crucial element in raising the self confidence and motivation of women.
- It is important to create a climate where women experience support and learn that they are entitled to it and how to create it for themselves. Leadership support methods and support networks are an integral part of increasing the political participation of women.
Mother centers are a place where women experience validation as mothers, where they are empowered by motherhood.
- Furthermore, the situation of motherhood cuts accross ethnic and class barriers and provides a common issue bringing together women from different social and cultural backgrounds.
- Mother centers offer the opportunity to find female role models. Very different kinds of women are active in the mother centers and can be experienced and "watched" in their development by the other women. This creates a large potential for identification and role model learning.

3.2 Barriers and Opposition

The inclusion of grassroot women in local governance and decision making processes is not only met with support and enthousiasm. Opposition and competition comes mainly from professionals in public welfare and social work organisations, who fear losing influence and their contingent of available funding. City councils that are further away from social work, like the construction department tend to be more open to grassroot participation than the departments dealing with the social programs like the family and youth welfare departments, who often seem to be more threatened by grassroot "competition". The general client orientation in social work seems to make it difficult to acknowledge grassroot groups as equal partners.

While support often comes from the top of municipal government, oppostion is experienced on the level of middle management of local authorities, who tend to be reluctant to change beaurocractic traditions and procedures, or who are working on innovative projects, because this is required of them, not because they genuinely believe in or wish for innovations.

This opposition is often not openly expressed, which makes it all the more difficult to deal with.

A reoccuring problem is that professional client oriented social work projects rename their projects "mother center" in order to get access to the mother center funding. For this reason the Mothers Platform evaluates the projects applying for the government funds from the mother center title and makes sure only authentic grassroot mother centers receive funding from this title.

In consultations with the urban planning departments there seemed to be a clear line drawn by the local authorities between listening to grassroot opinions and advice and making the decisions that involve financial expenditures. Participation is limited to expressing grassroot expertise in consultations, however financial debates and decisions are conducted behind closed doors.

A problem with which the mother centers continuously are faced with involves the fact that community women are interested that their work be acknowledged and renumerated, whereas public policies tend to look for voluntary work. This constitutes a constant thread of tension and debate in the negotiations and dealings with the local authorities.

The grassroot women often feel very overwhelmed and there is a tendency of „burn out“ of the active leaders by the process of introducing innovative channels of participation, since they usually have to „fight and invent their way in“ and there often is a considerable degree of an uncomfortable clash of cultures involved when dealing with the foreign and often alienating procedures and mechanisms of public bureaucracies and decision making bodies.

3.3 Strategies that work

Some lessons about strategies that work in engendering local governance and increasing grassroot participation include:

- Making the effects of political decisions on concrete lives visible. Creating channels where women can tell their stories in public.
Sticking to one´s own language. The mother center women feel that it has helped them in negotiations when they did not try to learn the professional or bureaucratic jargon, but rather expressed themselves in their own language and style.
- Making the flow of money transparent. It is a myth that there is no public money. There is. It just often goes to other places than to the issues women are concerned with. Making visible where the money goes increases publicity and negotiating power.
- Letting political debates and negotiations happen on grassroot territory. Some of the strongest break throughs happened when the mother centers succeeded in hosting political consultations on their own turf, in the mother centers and in one case even in their private living room. The magic of "reality" and "neighborhood" experienced there reminded decision makers about what politics is actually for, to enhance the quality of life of regular people.
- The Mothers Plattform has been successful in using the Habitat Agenda for their local negotiations. Referring to the fact that grassroot participation is spelled out as desired and agreed to in the Habitat Agenda has been of use when pushing for inclusion in public debates and committees.

3.4 Partnerships and leadership support

Creating leadership support for women who enter local decision making bodies is extremely important. In the mother center experience there is a massive culture clash involved when community women go into the male dominated institutional and corporte culture of politics. For this reason the Mothers Plattform recommends always being at least two grassroot representatives at political consultations.

It is important not to leave the women entering the political arena alone in this experience. Mainstreaming gender must be accompanied by collective reflection, analysis and working through of the (often alienating) experiences involved: How did I feel in the meetings? What was alien to me? Where did I feel devalued and intimidated? Which situations drain me, when did I come out feeling powerful and motivated? What strategies are not worth the toll they take on time, on energy, on emotional strength and personal ressources? Encouraging women to talk about these questions and providing support in finding solutions is a crucial element to sustainability of female participation in politics.

Survival can depend on building partnerships and networks. The mother center Freudenstadt is a very vivid example of this principle. For 6 years the local mother center initiative lobbyed their city council for rooms to open up a mother center - to no avail. Application after application were turned down. What in the end led to success was building a coalition with supportive female polititians from all the different parties and working together with the German Marketing Society who were assigned the task of designing a "city image" for the municipality and who were won over to recommend a mother center as an integral part of a "city image". Without the continuous support and consultations of the Mothers Platform, the women from Freudenstadt commented, they would never had had the energy to hold out for 6 years, before reaching their goal of opening a mother center in their town.

Supportive partnerships are crucial to developing grassroot participation in governance. The mother centers work together locally with many other groups and networks on various issues. In some cases partnerships prove to be easier on the local level than nationally. The relationship of the mother centers to the feminist movement i.e. often is somewhat strained by mutual prejudices and conflicts over what is considered "emancipative" or "traditional". On the local level however coalitions between the various women´s groups often are quite solid.

What is needed for good partnerships is that the grassroot women are perceived as experts and invited to the table on equal footing. Professionals are often in the position to open doors for grassroot women and provide them with insider information and knowhow. It is very important that professionals are aware of the support they can contribute. Simple lip service and the invitation to participate is usually not enough. What often is needed is the active promotion of the grassroot voice and the willingness to give central stage to grassroot women to enhance their visibility and to ensure that their contributions are heard.

3.5 Lasting Effects and Changes

Depending on size and how long they have been working, mother centers reach between 50 and 500 families in the neighborhood. For the women involved, the experience often changes their lives profoundly. In a DJI study the following replies were received to the question what effects the mother centers had on the individual women:

70% learned more tolerance, 58% stated the center put more joy into their life, and the same percentage, that the expereinces in the center helped them take leadership in their life. 56% said they learned to participate and raise their voices, 55% answered, they learned to say "no" and 52% said, they learned to state what they needed and to accept help.

In the latest DJI study (1997) 80% of the respondents felt that the mother center entriched the community, 47% saw improvements in the infrastrucutral conditions for families and 41% said, that the mother centers changed the neighborhood regarding more social contact and social integration (including acceptance of minority groups). 67% of the mother centers affirm that they have taken influence in their community by political actions and in 46% of the cases the mother centers are represented in municipal councils on urban planning and development.

Mother centers have also had effects on the understanding of the role of professionals in childcare and community services and in their attitude toward the competences of grassroot groups. In many cases fruitful partnerships have been built.

3.6 Replicability

The story of the mother centers as one of the fastest spreading grassroot women´s movements in Europe is a lesson in transferability. Currently there are around 400 mother centers, in West as well as in East Germany .They have also spread over the boarders to Holland, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, The Cesch Republic, Hungary and The Ukraine.

The spreading of the mother centers also into Central and Eastern European countries shows that they also apply to the conditions of post-socialist societies in transition. Many women in these societies find themselves at home with children, due to the increase of unemployment, and the reduction of public childcare. The isolation they face is especially virulent due to the fact that in socialist societies the tradition of community networks was discontinued and social coherence and inclusion mainly regulated by the workplace. Mother centers respond to the need in these countries to rebuild neighborhood structures and to create new places of social cohesion in the communities.

The conditions leading to this amazing replication of the mother center model are the fact that they address a "historical need" (see part I), that they originated from a strong partnership between grassroots and professionals ( the researchers at DJI), that their dissemination was facilitated by a book in the format of "story telling", by face to face exchanges, and by the regional and national networking and lobbying of the mothers offices and plattforms, and that there is a strong inspirational and „well-being“ element involved in the mother centers.

The role of the Mothers Platform in this process is mainly organising exchanges and providing written material on how to initate mother centers, capacity building, providing a plattform for reflection and strategy building, and funnelling grassroot leadership potential into political action, participation and governance.

What is needed for the mother center magic to work is a physical space in the community, rooms that are completely self-managed and at the disposal of grassroots, a place to gather without being clientelised, an inclusive approach to children, the remuneration of the work done in the mother centers and the acknowledgement of neighborhood women as "everyday life professionals".