A Brief History of VCWFC:

Over many decades, the United Nations has made significant progress in advancing gender equality, including through landmark agreements such as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

The Ventura County Women's Forum Collaborative is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to empowering Ventura County women around the most current global concerns for women, UN Women’s Four Strategic Priorities:

• governance and participation in public life

• women’s economic empowerment

• ending violence against women and girls

• women, peace and security, humanitarian action, and disaster risk reduction

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VCWFC began as a grass-roots gathering of local women leaders in 2005, 10 years after Diana Goodrow and Cecilia Fargo attended the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 and set out to bring the 12 global critical areas of concern and platform for action to Ventura County:

Poverty Education Health Violence Economic Justice

Power Sharing Institutional Mechanisms Human Rights

Media Peace Environment The Girl-Child

Between 2006 and 2012, we held five major, full-day forums with broad community attendance.

In the Fall of 2013, we introduced a new format to provide a vehicle for our many member organizations to host single topic, 60 minute presentations on subjects related to our stated issues through a gender lens. Click on the tabs in the menu for more information about past forums and seasons.

In 2018, we decided to play a more supportive role to the many like-minded organizations that had emerged in the county with our boots, sponsorship, collaboration, and communication tools.

Simultaneously, we worked with The Acorn Project to establish a stronger voice for Ventura County in the national and global community by applying for UN ECOSOC Consultative Status.

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, our UN ECOSOC Consultative Status was approved.

To represent our coastal community, in 2024, we worked with Coastal Keepers to provide input for the 2025 UN Ocean Conference.

In March 2026, VCWFC hosted a delegation of 20 activists at CSW70, the UN Women’s Conference, at the UN headquarters in New York City. The delegation included a diverse cross-section of Ventura County residents and interests - high schoolers, college students, and working-through-retired adults, multiple ethnicities, genders, economic backgrounds, and educational levels from throughout Ventura County.

Delegates represented the following organizations:

• Two women representing Safe House Project and The Excellent Way Ventura County, which support victims and survivors of human trafficking and sexual exploitation

• Seven youth and two adults representing Youth Right to Rise/Mariposa Advocacy, which provides support for immigrant families

• One college student and one young adult representing the Society for Women Engineers, which supports women in STEM fields

• Three women representing 805 Undocufund, which provides support for undocumented residents

• One Oxnard-based college student from the UC Berkeley Food Institute conducting research on farmworker health

• One woman representing Diversity Collective VC, which provides support for the LGBTQIA+ community

• One woman representing CFROG, which supports a just transition from fossil fuels to protect our health, economy, and climate

• VCWFC President

PLEASE JOIN US in bringing a intersectional, gender lens to important global issues in Ventura County and acting upon our role as members of the global community!

We are looking for collaborative leaders to join our team and help shape where we go from here!