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About the Support Group Format:
A suggested format for meetings is to first split a short amount of time equally among members so that each woman can share whats going well in her life, career and/or art making--only positive thoughts. Then the leader may share 5-10 minutes of her thoughts about the ALN/No Limits or/set a topic which is relevant to being a woman artist to be worked on during the meeting. The remainder of the time is usually divided equally among the members, including the leader and the assistant. During her time, each woman will be actively listened to by the rest of the group. In this time each person will often discuss her Largest Vision for herself with the help of the following questions:

• What is your largest vision for yourself as an artist and/or a leader?
• What are your first steps toward accomplishing this?
• What does support look like?

Considering these questions and fully being listened to often brings up feelings. This is natural and good. We give room for women to have their feelings understanding that they are just feelings and don't necessarily reflect reality. (For example, when you feel like a victim, it does not necessarily mean that you are or ever were a victim.)

It is beneficial for a beginning group to stay with the three questions for many weeks or even months. Like most simple things, this is hard to do or to decide to do routinely. Do not underestimate our inclination to forget these steps, or the power of using them. Each meeting ends with appreciations for each other and for the leader of the group.

• We gather to be with each other as artists and thinkers.
• We value and support ourselves and each other as artists and thinkers.
• We need to share our ideas, get feedback about them from others, and be in a community of other women artists and thinkers.
• At its root, making art is manifesting our own thinking in a unique and extremely valuable form.

We learn to trust ourselves to the same degree that we are able to trust other women.

Why we make a commitment to come together as women artists: As women growing up and being artists in this culture, we all have had some similar struggles. The better we can understand these struggles and realize that they are not our fault, the easier it will be to eliminate them and do the work we know we can do. Our success and ability to thrive as women artists depends completely on breaking all forms of isolation and increasing our visibility. In the Artist Leadership Network for Women, we focus on tools to end artists internalized oppression and women's internalized oppression. Our coming together to support each other as women to go for our greatest thinking is a contradiction to internalized oppression.

Examples of internalized oppression:

• Many women artists have a hard time remembering to put themselves or their art first.
• Many women artists do not value their work or the work of other women.
• Many women artists do not think their ideas are important enough to make great art.
• Many women artists get very discouraged about making a living from their art.
• Many women artists get confused about money: what they deserve to receive themselves as well as paying other women for their time and effort.

Examples of contradictions to these beliefs:
• There is no reason to limit paying attention to your thinking and your art.
• There is no reason to limit your appreciation of the art work of another woman.
• THERE ARE INFINITE POSSIBILITIES TO WHAT YOU CAN DO.

We need to build and maintain a community of women who are thrilled and excited by us as artists and who want to see us take the next big step...
A community to assist us in becoming as big
as we can be.