Welcome to Cowichan Valley International Women’s Day Rally & Festival website.
2021 schedule of events
- March 8 – 12:00 – 12:30
International Women’s Day Virtual Ceremony


The 2021 March 8 will be held from 12:00 – 12:30pm on Zoom and can be viewed at facebook.com/thediscourse
Welcome to Cowichan Valley International Women’s Day Rally & Festival website.
2021 schedule of events
Thank you for visiting. We’re in the third(!) exciting year of organizing events and welcome new members to help this grow.
Organizational skills, website, social media, fundraising, and generally being enthusiastic and positive about the road forward are essential. More on this later.
If you have something to offer not on this list, say what it is and how you think it fits. People with ideas are pure gold.
Five year plan/intention – Written in Feb 2017
March 8th, will be the focal point of a week long festival that will include a rally on the Saturday prior to March 8 (assuming the 8th falls on any other day of the week than Saturday) and a revived potluck that bonds the participants, held at the House of Friendship.
The rest of March would see a variety of institutions programming their regular events around the IWD theme of the year.
This will be led by the IWD committee, which will have a 10 member leadership team, and a minimum 100 women paid membership, of which there would be 30+ activists representing a diverse range of voices.
The specific tasks of the IWD Committee would be to organize a handful of anchor events such as the rally on a Saturday, and a speakers event on March 8, to prepare a brochure/booklet supporting the events related to IWD, and to coordinate advertising and promotion of the events as a whole, as a means of advancing the goals of the IWD theme.
The further role of the IWD Committee would be to provide encouragement to other local institutions to participate by shaping their March programming around the IWD theme, particularly, but not exclusively, in the week surrounding March 8.
We would reach out with the theme of the year, help brainstorm ideas, publish their participation in our well-distributed brochure, in our well-placed ads and media spots, and feature them in our PR.
The IWD Committee will include significant participation from local First Nations, and residents from a wide variety of other backgrounds and interests, bound together in the common purpose of advancing women’s rights and issues. Both leadership and activists will include both elders and youth, and the various events will draw 100s of women from across the region, including from Victoria and Nanaimo, but mostly from the Cowichan Valley.
Events will include everything from the rally advancing locally important women’s issues, to films, book readings, public speakers, sporting events, musical performers, demonstrations of traditional skills and lessons for the same, and non-traditional work job fairs/training sessions.
March 8 would feature a woman speaker of note…whose speech would be not about IWD, but about her important work in some area that matters deeply to our times and to our region.
Performances by significant women artists would be programmed at the Cowichan Performing Arts Centre, The Firehouse, the VIRL branches, the USW Heritage Hall, and the Duncan Showroom, as well as other regional spaces such as The Hub and the Farmer’s Institute, readings by women authors at bookstores and the library, films by and/or about powerful women and girls at the Caprice and the library.
The local media would be primed to anticipate the month’s events…it would be already in their annual calendar even before our press releases are sent out.
Due to the growing concern over the spread of COVID 19, some events on our calendar have been postponed and others are considering the same. While it is important to do what is possible to sustain community, and prevent isolation, a period of distance can help to flatten the disease curve. This will help our …
The Cowichan Valley International Women’s Day Committee is pleased to announce our fourth annual festival, centred around our Rally at Charles Hoey Park on March 7, 11am – 12:30pm. The festival begins March 2, with a book event at VIRL South Cowichan, and ends March 31, with a Roller Derby event at Cowichan Exhibition. Between these …
It was a perfect day and a wonderful event from beginning to end. Thank you to all who consulted and volunteered for the creation of today’s rally and to all of the presenters involved. We were honoured to have Dora Wilson there to open the rally with her daughter, Maureen Tommy, who drummed the welcome. …