Girls Guide to Three Estates
A journey, exploring female safety through the medium of creative art. Thanks to funding from the Ragdoll Foundation.
Between December 2022 and November 2023 InUnity embarked on an exciting new project for girls aged between 11-18 in the Three Estates area of Birmingham. The project ‘A Girls Guide to Three Estates’ involved creative arts workshops, mapping, community consultation and creative interpretation. The main aims of the project were to use these creative arts skills learnt to facilitate a conversation within the wider community about female safety.
The Group-
Our core group consisted of around 12 young ladies from the local area, some referred from local youth groups , some from the local school and some girls that we met during the early stages of the project. The diverse range of characters and opinions is really what helped the group thrive, learning to work alongside one another, create together and come together over a shared passion for speaking about female safety really was what made the group special.
Early stages of the project- Consultation, walking and mapping.
Our aim in in the initial phase of the project was to really understand how women and girls actually felt about the community, we created a very simple consultation postcard and asked 94 women in the local area these questions;
Where in the local community do you feel safe? And why?
Where in the local community do you feel unsafe? And why?
53% of women that took part in the consultation said that they only feel safe at home, whilst 23% said that they feel safe at the community centre, this was a good start for us as our weekly meetup was being held at Hawkesley Community Centre. Over 30% of participants said they didn’t feel safe anywhere in the community with ‘Hawkesley Square’ ‘The Fold’ and ‘The Mounds’ highlighted as the three places women and girls felt the most unsafe. Our group decided to focus on these area’s when walking and creating the map as the believed it was important to know why women felt so unsafe in these area’s.
Image- Map created with the girls to identify theirs and the wider communities thoughts and feelings around female safety.
Artist workshops
During the workshop phase of the project we had 4 local female artists join us for six different workshops , these were; zine/publication making, illustration, creative writing, Graphic design, collage and poetry. The skills learnt during these workshops helped us to express ourselves visually , creatively and verbally.
Giving back to our community
Throughout the project the group came up with many idea’s, thoughts and feelings on ways in which the community could benefit, we were luck enough to work alongside the local city council Neighborhood action group and highlight places and issues within the area, their suggestions were fed directly back to people that could make a change.
The girls also developed and delivered a series of 4 workshops at a local school. Informed by the workshops that they had taken, the girls designed a workshop for boys and girls to make a mini zine about the Three Estates