WIGGLESWORTH'S Hilary Shaw has taken over as leader of the Soroptimist International of Great Britain and Ireland.

Mrs Shaw was installed as president of the organisation last Saturday in a ceremony attended by nearly 2,000 women from around the world.

For the next year she will be heading up an organisation with branches in countries as far afield as Thailand, through Asia and Africa, and across to the Caribbean, as well as all around the UK, the largest regions being Yorkshire and the North West.

Soroptimists are women in business or management who work in their spare time on practical projects to improve human rights, health, education and the environment, both locally and around the world. One example of their work in this area is the setting up and running of Child Contact Centres, where children can see their "absent" parent in a safe and comfortable environment. A lot of fund raising and lobbying goes on too.

Internationally, Soroptimists work in partnership with organisations such as the International Red Cross, Sightsavers and others, establishing sustainable projects to improve living standards, health and education. During their last major project in Thailand to give young women a real alternative to having to work in the commercial sex industry, their success was obvious - over a period of four years, the numbers of girls leaving the project villages to the the capital and centre of the sex trade, Bankgok, dropped by a staggering 91 per cent.

Mrs Shaw lives with her husband, Andrew, near Wigglesworth. A solicitor by profession for over 20 years, she is still a consultant with Keighley solicitors Chivers Walsh Smith but in the spring she retired from legal practice and joined Andrew in his growing garden design and construction business, Gardenmakers. They have now opened a retail nursery at Coars Farm, which already has nearly 2,000 varieties of hardy plants and shrubs for sale.

Mrs Shaw said: "It will be an exciting year, full of opportunities and challenges. My theme for the year is 'You Can't Beat a Woman', intended both to reflect the intolerability of violence towards women and to celebrate women's achievements.

"2001 is the International Year of Volunteers, and many organisations would simply cease to function without the many women (and men too!) who give up their time to give such valuable service. We shall also be researching and addressing the growing menace of the trafficking of women and girls, which is sadly going on all around us and needs to be stopped."

Although she is only just beginning her term of office, Mrs Shaw's year as President Elect has taken her to Cameroon in West Africa, where she took part in the chartering of the sixth club to open in that country, and to South Africa, where the organisation's annual conference will take place in 2001.

"The Soroptimists in Africa are amazing women, and I feel very privileged to have been able to see some of their work. Running shelters for abused women and for street children, adopting hospital wards for TB sufferers, maternity patients and the mentally ill, and day care centres for the elderly and for the very young, are just a few of the projects undertaken by the clubs. One club runs a "Seeds for Plastic" Centre, where locals trade in waste plastic they collect from the road sides and are given seeds and land to cultivate in exchange. The plastic is then cleaned, shredded and turned into beads, bags and hats or other crafts and sold, which both pays the craftsmen and women and buys the seed - a wonderful practical project which provides employment and cleans up the environment!"

It promises to be a busy year for Mrs Shaw, but she is thoroughly looking forward to it.

"On my own, there is no way that I could begin to make even the smallest impression on the problems facing the world today. Being a Soroptimist gives me the opportunity to make that difference, and the chance not only to find fulfilment, but fun and friendship too."