After nine years as Executive Director of NAWL, Bonnie Diamond will be retiring on February 1, 2006. Her departure is a great loss. Members, staff and volunteers at NAWL can confirm that from the moment she was hired and throughout the years of her leadership she has brought tremendous vitality to NAWL. She has shown us her remarkable skill and commitment to creating respectful and productive working relations between women within and beyond the NAWL office. Bonnie has ensured that NAWL plays a critical role in advancing the status of women nationally and internationally.
Bonnie has been a mentor and a friend to many young women, reaching out to the next generation of feminists with warmth, generosity and respect for difference. She has also demonstrated her tireless commitment to empowering women world-wide, as is evident in her work with women’s organizations in Beijing, China. To give just one example of Bonnie’s coalition-building skills, NAWL recently played a crucial role in the formation of the Coalition for Women’s Equality, a lobby group that has been instrumental in the creation of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Bonnie also leaves NAWL with a more secure funding base, enabling the organization to freely pursue its agenda of law reform.
Bonnie’s achievements are widely recognized: on November 15th, 2005, she received the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Person’s Case. In her speech, Governor General Michaëlle Jean saluted Bonnie’s courage, commitment and generosity as a steadfast champion of women’s human rights.
On behalf of everyone at NAWL, we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to Bonnie for her years of dedicated service and brilliant lobbying efforts to secure law reform for women. Bonnie, we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours!
Margaret Denike is a professor of Gender Equality & Social Justice at Nipissing University, former Coordinator of NAWL’s NSC and a member of various NAWL working groups. Rachel Cox works on contract at NAWL.
