Dear supporters, followers and participants of the Leeds Women’s Centre feasibility study,
We thought it may be useful to give you an update following the publication of the feasibility study, conducted by Urban Catalysts (UC) on behalf of the Women & Girls Alliance Leeds and Women Friendly Leeds, for a Leeds Women’s Centre. We are so grateful that literally hundreds of you had your say, and shared your thoughts and feelings on the subject of whether Leeds needs or wants a Women’s Centre, and helped us to start to unpick what that might look like. Our collective ‘dreaming’ and ‘designing’ gave us lots of ideas, and focussed on what your priorities were. There were also a lot of different view points that need to be carefully considered, to ensure a Women’s Centre is as inclusive as it can be, and safe for all.
Inclusivity has different meanings to different people, and whilst we want to ensure that all women have safe access to any Women’s Centre, we want to specifically recognise that many women live with additional oppression and experience barriers to support. Inequality cuts across multiple characteristics and there are interrelated inequalities existing for women in relation to race, religion, sexuality, age, class and ability for example.
Additionally, the question of whether a Women’s Centre would be single-sex or inclusive of trans women was a subject that many had a view on. We know that there are a mixture of views across the Women Friendly Leeds movement, and society, about women’s services and trans gender people. As a movement we value diversity and inclusion, and accept people’s views and their rights to voice them, and expect them to be tolerant and respectful.
In order to support the views of as many women as we can, we propose to consider the issue of whether it is single sex, or gender identity inclusive, depending on the option being delivered, and then we can be clear and transparent on that from the outset.
Based on your feedback, we were able to design a number of options to pilot, in order to test and evaluate what could be achieved, and that is where we are at right now.
We are in the next phase of designing and planning the delivery of a small number of ‘pop up’ 1-day (or evening) Women’s Centres at different geographical locations including North, South, East, West and City Centre to test out some of what we have learnt. Here’s an outline of how we are going to do it.
We have just appointed a Women’s Centre pilot co-ordinator, Taylor Harrison, who, over the next few months, will be sourcing venues, activities, a range of professionals and volunteers who can be there on the day, supporting with signposting, and appointments, and covering as many priorities as possible. Priorities that our feasibility study identified are employability, benefits, housing, health, safety, experiences amongst others. We will then have a small programme of pop up Women’s Centre events that we plan to run in January and February 2025. We will of course advertise these in plenty of time. These will form the latter half of our activities as part of the feasibility study. They will be designed to test out what we can achieve, what works well, and what more we have to learn, rather than get it spot on right… we’re definitely still on our learning journey.
Should you have any questions, or feel you may be able to support us, please feel free to get in touch with Taylor by emailing [email protected]
We plan to do further updates via the Women Friendly Leeds newsletter. If you are not already signed up to receive the newsletter and would like to be, please subscribe via the button on the left of the home screen on our website https://womenfriendlyleeds.org/
