Women Reaching Women was a three-year action research project aimed at raising awareness of world poverty, gender inequality and climate change. The project brought together the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Oxfam, the Everyone Foundation and a unique group of 28 women drawn from Women's Institutes across the country. The project explored what motivates us as individuals to act and how to overcome a limited sense of personal agency in comparison with the scale of gender and international development issues. Narrative was central to creating a strong sense of commitment to the project and building the necessary trust between the participants, enabling them to deal with the challenging content. In utilising personal and evocative narratives both within a series of workshops and through the action research cycle reports (produced annually), this paper argues that the women involved were more able to engage with the "wicked problems" inherent in gender and international development. This paper also responds to an acknowledged gap in the literature in terms of gender, international development and climate change. The literature on wicked problems appears to focus on links with action research, policy development and networks, but there is little from the perspective of gender and action research in informal adult education. (Contains 4 notes.)