Saturday 13th March - Regional Council and Programme Action Meeting

Friday 14th - Sunday 16th May - Joint Regional Conference with North West England and Isle of Man to be held at The Daresbury Hotel, Warrington

Saturday 19th June - Regional Council and Programme Action (AGM)

Saturday 10 the July - UK PAC Study Day - to be held at Reading University

Saturday 11th September - Regional Council and Programme Action Meeting

Sunday 26th September - Friendship Lunch and Awards Ceremony to be held at The Wrightington Hotel, Wrightington, Wigan

Thursday 21st - Saturday 23rd October - Federation Conference, Manchester

Saturday 4th December - Regional Couoncil and Programme Action Meeting

On a very blustery day in April – the members of the South Lancashire team which organised the Ripple Concert in November 2008, attended the Headquarters of United Utilities in Warrington, to hand over a cheque for £2,827 to Michael Knight the Chief Executive of Water Aid North West, being the money raised from the Concert.
From left to right, the photograph shows:
Michael Knight, Val Moss Immediate Past Regional President, Norma Parry Press & Publicity, Wendy Ros-Barker Committee Member, Diana Bailey PR to Michael Knight, Bernadette Platt Regional President, Denise Baldwin Treasurer and Eileen Griffiths Past Regional President.

South Lanachsire Region hosted a Concert at The Theatre Royal in St. Helens on Friday 28th November 2008, which raised the sum of £2,500 for Water Aid.
The idea was formulated at the Glasgow Convention in 2007 as a way of acknowledging the work which Lynn Dunning has done for Soroptimist International the creation of  a “Ripple Effect” in the third world was taken from her closing speech as International President. Knowing of Lynn’s penchant for sanitation it was the obvious choice to make Water Aid the chosen charity for this project and United Utilities were happy to help us.

The concert was a resounding success with a full evening of entertainment from The Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra and Haydock Male Voice Choir both of whom are award winners in their respective fields. Two very different performances but both first class were enjoyed by the audience present.

A raffle was held in the interval and our thanks must go to Beaverbooks the Jewellers for providing an exquisite gold bracelet as 1st Prize and also to Tyers of St. Helens, Kathleen Beavis of SI Manchester, SI Southport, SI Ramsbottom, SI Oldham and SI Bootle for contributing all the other raffle prizes.

Maureen Walsh from Radio Merseyside and SI Liverpool, hosted the evning in the presence of many distinguised guests including the Mayor of St. Helens and Lynn herslef.

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks to you, more than 375,000 individuals have given their names to UNIFEM to be counted

in the Say NO to Violence against Women campaign, helping to break the silence and give voice

to women and girls who have experienced violence. The 25 November challenge? To deliver one million names to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

on 25 November. Why is it so important? To demonstrate the broad-based international support for making ending

violence against women a top priority. How to beat the challenge? Spread and post UNIFEM’s Say NO Widget -

specially designed for websites: If you have a website, blog or social networking site (for example, Facebook, MySpace),

you can put the Say NO to Violence against Women widget on your page and collect names

for the campaign right on your website. a.. Go to http://rocketxl.com/unifem b.. Click on “Embed” a.. Press the Facebook, MySpace or LiveJournal button (depending on the type of networking site you have), b.. Or “click here to grab code” - the code will be copied to your clipboard and you can paste it on your homepage or organization’s website. That’s it! Now you can collect names and keep track of how many people have said NO on your website. Please Use and Spread the Say NO Widget a.. Organizations and webmasters prominently post the UNIFEM Say NO widget

on your organization’s home page. b.. Use the widget to start a friendly competition among organization members -

offer a prize or recognition and watch the numbers climb. c.. Send to members a “Say NO campaign bulletin” that features the widget tool. d.. Involve young people in the effort - experts in social media, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Because of the technical requirements, the Widget works in the Flash computer language

and not HTML.

The current UNIFEM HTML-based site, www.saynotoviolence.org, continues to run, so please,

make full use of it. Thank you so much for being a key outreach advocate.

Please send feedback or questions to Rita Gibbons (rita.gibbons@unifem.org)

of the UNIFEM Say NO Outreach Team.