Where It All Began: The Prayer That Started CAVIWO

It was an ordinary evening in 2016. I was having dinner at a friend's house, sitting at the table with Adeline Akwa and Fabiola Nyufor. One of them suggested we join a group in the city. I said no, unless it is a prayer group where women can have a safe space to pray, share knowledge, and help each other. They both said, let us do it. That sentence, spoken over a meal, changed the direction of my life and, I now believe, the lives of thousands of women I would never meet. Movements rarely begin with a plan. They begin with a moment of clarity, and that evening was mine.

I left that dinner and began gathering other women. I did not have a strategy. I had a conviction that women needed a space that belonged to them, where they could bring their whole selves, their faith and their fears, their hopes and their hardships, without having to perform or explain. I called women I knew, and they called women they knew, and within days a small circle had formed. By our first meeting, we had more than ten. We sat together, prayed together, and shared what was on our hearts, and something in the room settled into a peace I had not known I was missing.

The group soon started attracting women from outside the Ottawa community, across Canada, the United States, and across the continents. What began as a prayer circle became a movement. I did not engineer that growth. I could not have. Women heard that there was a space where they would be welcomed, believed, and supported, and they came. They came from churches and from none. They came from stable lives and from shattered ones. They came carrying grief, ambition, loneliness, and faith, sometimes all at once, and they found, in the circle, a place where all of it could rest.

Everything CAVIWO is today, the programs, the branches, the advocacy, the entrepreneurship cohorts, grew from that single decision to pray together. We did not start with a strategic plan. We started with a table, a few women, and the conviction that we were not meant to carry our burdens alone. That conviction has been the soil from which every program has grown. When we saw women grieving without support, we built grief circles. When we saw women struggling financially, we built capacity training. When we saw women with skills and no income, we built entrepreneurship cohorts. Each program was a response to a need we first encountered in prayer.

That is not a coincidence. Prayer, for us, is not a ritual we perform before the real work begins. It is the place where the real work is discerned. In the quiet of shared prayer, we hear what women are actually carrying, and what we hear shapes what we build. A program designed in a boardroom serves the assumptions of the boardroom. A program designed in a prayer circle serves the actual lives of the women in it. The difference is everything, and it is why our weekly gatherings remain the heart of the organization, even as the programs around them have multiplied.

That conviction has never left us. Our weekly gatherings remain the spiritual anchor of the organization. They are where women are known by name, where grief is held, where hope is renewed, and where the work of the week is carried back into the world with strength. A woman can attend every program we offer and still feel unknown if she never enters the circle. The circle is where she becomes a person rather than a participant. That distinction is the reason we will never let the programs replace the prayer. The programs serve the women. The prayer knows them.

I am often asked whether a movement rooted in faith can serve women of all backgrounds. I answer that it can, and it does, because the door of our circle opens inward, not outward. We do not require a woman to share our faith to enter. We require only that she be willing to be known. Women who do not share our beliefs come, and stay, and serve, because what they find is not a test of doctrine but a practice of care. The faith that founded us is the source of our welcome, not the condition of it. We welcome because we were welcomed. That is the whole of our theology of belonging.

The early days were small and unglamorous. We met in living rooms. We shared what little we had. We prayed for women whose names we sometimes did not yet know. There were no grants, no staff, no strategic partners. There was only the conviction that women should not suffer alone and the willingness to show up, week after week, for whoever came. That willingness, sustained over years, became the foundation everything else was built on. I tell this to remind myself, and anyone listening, that movements are not built by resources. They are built by consistency, and consistency is available to anyone.

If you ask me what holds CAVIWO together through every season, I will tell you it is not a program. It is the prayer. It always has been. When funding has been uncertain, the prayer held us. When programs have struggled, the prayer held us. When the world has felt overwhelming, the prayer held us. I do not say this to romanticize hardship. I say it to name the source of our resilience. We are not sustained by our own strength. We are sustained by the practice of bringing our weakness, together, before a strength greater than our own, and finding, again and again, that it is enough.

To the women who were at that first table, and to the thousands who have joined the circle since, I want to say thank you. You trusted a simple suggestion, and you built, with your presence and your faithfulness, something none of us could have built alone. The movement is not mine. It is ours. And if you are reading this and have never been part of a circle like this one, know that there is a chair with your name on it. The table has only grown. There is still room. There always will be.

I have thought often about why that first evening mattered so much, and I have come to believe it was because the suggestion was not really about a group. It was about permission. For most of my life, I had waited for someone else to start the thing I knew was needed. That evening, I realized the waiting was the obstacle. The thing I was waiting for was the thing I was meant to start. I wonder how many women reading this are in that same waiting, holding a conviction they have not yet acted on, believing someone else will build the space they know is needed. I want to tell you what that dinner told me. The someone is you. The evening is now. The table is already set.

There is a detail from that first meeting I have never shared publicly. After we prayed, one of the women began to cry, quietly, and then to speak about a loss she had carried alone for months. No one interrupted her. No one tried to fix it. We simply sat with her, and when she finished, we prayed for her by name. She told me afterward that it was the first time since her loss that she had felt held. That moment, more than any plan or strategy, is what CAVIWO is. It is a room where a woman can weep and be met, where her name is spoken with love, and where the weight she carries is shared, if only for an evening, by sisters who will not let her carry it alone. Everything we have built since grew from that single act of being present to a woman in pain, and everything we will build in the future will grow from the same.

I look back now and see that the dinner table was not the beginning of CAVIWO. It was the moment I stopped waiting for permission. The real beginning was years earlier, in the experiences that shaped my conviction, in the losses that taught me what women carry alone, in the faith that taught me that carrying it together is possible. The dinner was simply the moment the conviction became action. I share this because I believe many women carry convictions that are waiting for their moment of action, and I want to say, with the full authority of someone who waited too long and then finally did not, that the moment does not arrive on its own. It is chosen. I chose it over a meal with two friends. You will choose yours in your own way. When you do, you will discover what I discovered, that the thing you were afraid to start was the thing you were made for, and that the women you were afraid no one would gather were waiting, all along, for someone to set the table.

Written by

Adeline Ijang

Contributor to the CAVIWO community sharing stories of hope, resilience, and advocacy.