Long Live Women!

As part of CAN’s project, Rochdale Women’s Voices, which celebrates women’s strength and resilience, we worked with two partners: the Kashmiri Youth Project (KYP) and the Hopwood Hall College/Petrus Social Prescribing project.

This project brought new creative opportunities to women mailto:https://www.hopwood.ac.uk/from different generations from diverse backgrounds. Rochdale Women’s Voices challenged the negative representation of poverty and social exclusion, which sometimes characterises the portrayal Rochdale.

2024’s strand culminated in two events to celebrate 2024’s International Women’s Day, following CAN’s work with the groups led by CAN’s Creative Producer, Mahboobeh Rajabi.

Ninety women from KYP’s daycare group and sewing project attended a celebratory event on Thursday 7 March, to mark International Women’s Day.

The event featured a video with stories and reflections on what it is to be a woman in the South East Asian community.

Over two months, KYP’s groups worked with the poet, writer, and performer Hafsah Bashir to develop their stories.  Hafsah hosted the day with poetry and spoken word.

Musician and recording artist Rubaya played soulful Sufi-inspired music to begin the day.

The celebration featured inspirational speakers, including award-winning international community and multi-sports mindset coach Kai Baig, who represented Lancashire Cricket Foundation, Bushra Sultana, the Creative Engagement Manager for Rochdale’s Culture Co-op, and Councillor Sameena Zaheer, one of Rochdale’s first South Asian women councillors.

Women from KYP’s sewing project created and performed a comedy sketch that wittily illustrated the challenges women with diverse heritages face when trying to access local services by phone.

The celebration ended with food, conversations, music, and KYP-style dance.

“I loved the Dolki and enjoyed celebrating our culture and how everyone joins in.”

“I learned lots of new things. I loved every session.”

“I love listening to each other and being able to share our stories.”

Our Flickr album of the event at KYP is here with photos by Ellie Waters.

Young women and non-binary people from the Hopwood Hall College/Petrus social prescribing project worked with Mahboobeh to share their stories and reflections through photography, spoken word, songwriting, music, and video.

Ellie Waters, a photographer and visual artist; singer-songwriter Leah Wild; and Caroline Kennedy from M6 Theatre developed the young women’s leadership, confidence, and creative skills and gave the group insights into creative careers, careers which working-class young people find difficult to access.

The group’s creative outputs shared their experiences as young women, the difficulties they face, their choices, and their hopes for the future.

The lively celebratory event on Friday 8 March at the college’s Middleton campus, shared the group’s stories to an invited audience of students, family, friends, and college staff.

Medulla, the Manchester-based rapper and hip-hop artist, gave an inspirational talk in which she shared her story of starting out in music and the various challenges she faced on her journey to becoming an acclaimed artist in the UK’s rap and hip-hop scene.

“I really enjoyed working with Ellie and Leah. I enjoyed working on taking photos of my objects and creating ways I could say my message.”

“It was amazing we could do so much and make all our ideas happen in different creative forms. It showed us we can do it.”

Our Flickr album of the event at Hopwood Hall College is here with photos by Ellie Waters.

Subject to funding, CAN hopes to build a more extensive partnership with Rochdale-based women’s groups, which will reflect Rochdale’s diverse communities, with a larger-scale sharing event at the newly refurbished Rochdale Town Hall in March 2025.

The project was supported by the Lankelly Chase Foundation and Arts Council England.