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MS grant/33

what's convenient for Pasadena is twenty miles away from the San Fernando Valley. Et. cetera. We're smack in the middle of our whole area, no more than a mile from the intersection of four freeways, there's even a bus stop two blocks away. We point all this out, and trust our programs will be good enough to draw people in.

The programs work: people come. The Extension Program offers courses four nights a week on a quarterly basis, plus one- and two-day weekend workshops. (Enrollment has been 1500 in the first 20 months) The courses offer technical, critical skills (e.g. in photography, writing, art criticism) and practical, survival skills (e.g., assertiveness training, community organizing, grant-writing). The Extension Program also offers courses that explore our roots (e.g., the history of women in America, the lesbian novel, mothers and daughters).

Although we subsist on volunteer labor in many aspects of the Building's work, the Extension Program has from the outset paid its faculty and administrative staff. When people object that our tuition is too high ($45 for eight-week classes, $18 for one-day workshops), we point out that if we are going to change our society, it is we who will pay for it. Moreover, if we don't pay our teachers we force at least some of them into the very mind-killing jobs we are all working to eliminate. The tuition situation has also, this year, been eased by an NEA grant which has allowed us to offer scholarships to 40 women without financial resources (old, women newly out of prison, women on welfare).