Last Wednesday was the second of our 'new style' meetings and the most memorable thing about the event, writing almost a week after it happened, was how wonderfully honest and open our discussions were and how our free flow of ideas helped us give birth to a plan that we're really proud of and really excited about!
To deal with the ideas and issues raised at the last meeting first, it appears that SPUC haven't hit any of our local GPs with their abortion leaflets, so no fight to have there! We'd looked into the possibility of meeting with some of the Nepalese women in our community for conversation classes but their community groups appear to already have tutors in place after the death of a husband whose wife couldn't communicate with emergency services after his collapse. We talked again about becoming a community group for Stop the Traffik. Several attempts to locate the Ashford group who are already working against trafficking have failed after some serious detective work so now we're going to go ahead with our application and see how we get on.
The last 'hanging over' issue we talked about was the issue of the 11-18 night at Liquid but this came out of our long discussion about young women and the particular issues that they are facing in our society and local communities at the moment. I'm not going to try and sum up the conversation but will just say that the wonderful work that Sara does at 'Platform 51' gave Hannah and I some really interesting and worrying insights to the experiences of young women, while Hannah's experiences with children and mums at her primary school helped us discuss both the orgins of low self esteem amongst women and the experiences of young mums today. Our conversation ranged through topics including women's health and well being, the dangerous effect of maistream pornography on young women, the possible antidote of feminist pornography, the financial difficuties being faced by many lone mums and the effectiveness of sex education in schools of dealing with the issues we felt were important for girls today. It was a wonderful discussion in which I felt I learned so much and was able to think through new ideas with women who both challenged and confirmed my own ideas in equal amounts!
Out of our discussion came a more practical idea for an event that we hope to start organising for a weekend late in July. Having looked about at some wonderful websites for a variety of charities supporting women, I'd noticed that what was mostly requested was consciousness and fund raising. As our chosen charity and forum for action is going to be Stop the Traffik we discussed events that might help us support them. The first idea floated was a clothes exchange event. However, having heard Sara talk about a girls' health and well being festival that she recently arranged in Tunbridge Wells for the launch of a magazine she has just edited, aimed at the young women 'Project 51' works with, we started to 'grow' the idea. We're thinking about extending the clothes exchange/fashion idea into an event aimed, at least in part, at women who are trying to return to work but are perhaps lacking confidence in the application procedure. We had lots of ideas about the different skills of women we know who might be able to get involved in offering style advice for interviews, CV writing workshops, interview skills etc - if it sounds like we're talking about you, we probably are so get in touch before we send the girls round! A lot of the ideas we had were inspired by the wonderful women at Working Wardrobe who we're definitely going to sound out for advice. We're hoping to use the event to raise consciousness and money for Stop the Traffik and to raise confidence in as many women as we can get to come along! Let us know what you think!
Finally, we discussed our questions for Any Questions and tabled what we thought were three really stonking questions, predictably none of them got picked on the night! However, Hannah and I really enjoyed attending, especially as the panel consisted entirely of women. The highlight for us was listening to the brilliant Laurie Penny finally giving voice to the experiences, concerns and legitimate anger of the young people who were viciously attacked by the riot squads of the metropolitan police in Trafalgar Square on 26th March, but that's a whole other blog post...
We ended by deciding that we'd have another low key meeting in a month's time and then poster another meeting for the month after. We've been so pleased by the amount of interest being shown by members of our Facebook group and hope that eventually all our diaries will coincide and we'll get to meet you all. Here's to our next meeting!
To deal with the ideas and issues raised at the last meeting first, it appears that SPUC haven't hit any of our local GPs with their abortion leaflets, so no fight to have there! We'd looked into the possibility of meeting with some of the Nepalese women in our community for conversation classes but their community groups appear to already have tutors in place after the death of a husband whose wife couldn't communicate with emergency services after his collapse. We talked again about becoming a community group for Stop the Traffik. Several attempts to locate the Ashford group who are already working against trafficking have failed after some serious detective work so now we're going to go ahead with our application and see how we get on.
The last 'hanging over' issue we talked about was the issue of the 11-18 night at Liquid but this came out of our long discussion about young women and the particular issues that they are facing in our society and local communities at the moment. I'm not going to try and sum up the conversation but will just say that the wonderful work that Sara does at 'Platform 51' gave Hannah and I some really interesting and worrying insights to the experiences of young women, while Hannah's experiences with children and mums at her primary school helped us discuss both the orgins of low self esteem amongst women and the experiences of young mums today. Our conversation ranged through topics including women's health and well being, the dangerous effect of maistream pornography on young women, the possible antidote of feminist pornography, the financial difficuties being faced by many lone mums and the effectiveness of sex education in schools of dealing with the issues we felt were important for girls today. It was a wonderful discussion in which I felt I learned so much and was able to think through new ideas with women who both challenged and confirmed my own ideas in equal amounts!
Out of our discussion came a more practical idea for an event that we hope to start organising for a weekend late in July. Having looked about at some wonderful websites for a variety of charities supporting women, I'd noticed that what was mostly requested was consciousness and fund raising. As our chosen charity and forum for action is going to be Stop the Traffik we discussed events that might help us support them. The first idea floated was a clothes exchange event. However, having heard Sara talk about a girls' health and well being festival that she recently arranged in Tunbridge Wells for the launch of a magazine she has just edited, aimed at the young women 'Project 51' works with, we started to 'grow' the idea. We're thinking about extending the clothes exchange/fashion idea into an event aimed, at least in part, at women who are trying to return to work but are perhaps lacking confidence in the application procedure. We had lots of ideas about the different skills of women we know who might be able to get involved in offering style advice for interviews, CV writing workshops, interview skills etc - if it sounds like we're talking about you, we probably are so get in touch before we send the girls round! A lot of the ideas we had were inspired by the wonderful women at Working Wardrobe who we're definitely going to sound out for advice. We're hoping to use the event to raise consciousness and money for Stop the Traffik and to raise confidence in as many women as we can get to come along! Let us know what you think!
Finally, we discussed our questions for Any Questions and tabled what we thought were three really stonking questions, predictably none of them got picked on the night! However, Hannah and I really enjoyed attending, especially as the panel consisted entirely of women. The highlight for us was listening to the brilliant Laurie Penny finally giving voice to the experiences, concerns and legitimate anger of the young people who were viciously attacked by the riot squads of the metropolitan police in Trafalgar Square on 26th March, but that's a whole other blog post...
We ended by deciding that we'd have another low key meeting in a month's time and then poster another meeting for the month after. We've been so pleased by the amount of interest being shown by members of our Facebook group and hope that eventually all our diaries will coincide and we'll get to meet you all. Here's to our next meeting!
