Project Updates - February 2014
Please click on the links below to find out what each organisation achieved and the benefit that being involved in the project had on the women service users.
Project Updates - August 2013
Inspire will be running a digital stories course in September. Digital stories weave images, music and voice together giving depth and insight into personal reflections of characters, situations and experiences. Women will have an opportunity to develop skills in photography, IT, Literacy, editing and directing culminating in the creation of their own personal digital story.
KeyChanges has completed the women’s dialogue for a film and conferencing event and completed the filming. Women have also completed presentation training in order to speak publicly about their views of the CJS.
Together Women Projects are planning on holding an event around the end of August / first week in September. Planning is well underway and they have a great variety of women that are interested in taking part, ensuring that they collect as many views and experiences as possible.
Changing Lives at present have four women undertaking one of the projects named ‘A Map in the Life Of…’. The women have created a ‘timeline’ of one day in August. This will be repeated in September in order to see if there is a pattern of issues faced by women on a daily basis. The women have kept diaries and have a camera to take photo’s of anything relevant to how they are feeling on that particular day. Once this has been repeated, the Cyrenians will be in a position to put all of the information together and create a project which will incorporate the voices and experiences of each woman. Each woman has been made aware of the opportunity they have to speak about their experiences and are looking forward to sharing this with other people. They also have a peer mentor who will be doing this project with the women.
As for the ‘Box of Chocolates’ Project; they have six women who are to start this week on taking photo’s of places, communities, personal treasures that are meaningful to them. Each photograph will be talked about for twenty seconds so the women are currently writing down ideas for discussions. One woman in particular has poetry that she has written about being involved in the criminal justice system. To help with both projects, they have support from Tyne and Wear Museums who are helping with creative writing as well as support to put both projects together in the form of a presentation. They will start this in October.
Startup have pretty much finished their project and gathered the voices of their women. The questions were completed by their women and they discussed their answers as a group which was really good. This was filmed and photos were taken. They also did a Dragons Den event last month which demonstrated the type of support women need when they are released from prison. They also filmed some women one to one to get their voices heard, this will all be edited and a film produced for the project. Hopefully when you have the event at the end of the User Voice project, the footage can be shown to the policy makers so that they can see the real impact.
Anawim initially had a slow start, but they are now happy to report lots of interest in this project. Having identified 10 women they are currently waiting for delivery of the first photography workshop, scheduled to take place in early September. Following this the women will be supported to take photographs of their journey at the Centre, as well as contextual shots to give a background to their lives.
Running alongside the photography element one of their volunteers has committed to helping them to record participant stories of their engagement with the service in digital format. These stories will be edited to provide an audio soundtrack.
A further photography workshop will then take place at the end of September to look through and choose some images from each of the women to print and exhibit.
Negotiations are underway with a local café to provide a public venue, although this aspect may take a while to organise. Needless to say they will also be mounting the exhibition at Anawim itself to give everyone the chance to see the work which has been done.