Fife young women's project releases safe spaces project, forges new friendships

The Young Women Lead - Fife project met for the final time recently having worked on the project for the last six months.

The project was run by the Young Women’s Movement and encouraged self-identifying women and non-binary people, who feel comfortable in women-only spaces, aged between 16-30 to share experiences as they sought to affect change in their local communities.

The project started life in partnership with the Scottish Parliament. Young women met in a committee format to discuss issues that were significant to them, such as women in sport and sex education in schools. Working with the committee clerks, they produced a report on the back of their discussions.

However, according to Laurie Duffy, national programmes coordinator, it has evolved post-Covid with the young women now meeting in their local communities.

Laurie explained: “We essentially revamped the project. It was totally different with a focus on speaking to young women in their local authority area and finding out what they’re passionate about, related to their community”.

Existing organisations within Fife and a social media call out were used to garner interest from young people from around the area and allow them to connect with new people. According to Laurie: “Some of the participants had known each other already, but most didn’t.”

The group has run throughout Scotland, with Dundee, Renfrewshire and the Highlands already benefiting from the sessions alongside Fife.

And the region’s group is already seeing impact beyond its boundaries, with a Highlands business looking to make use of the project's toolkit.

Laurie explained the process started.

"When we go into each local authority area, we ask the young people what they’re interested in and what they’re passionate about.

“Each group comes up with a project that it wants to work on over the course of the project. Young Women Lead - Fife came up with the idea of a project focused on the idea of space, and how space can be so important to whether people would get involved with things or not”.

One of the key benefits was that it has allowed women from a wide age range to meet up as equals -something that Laurie said sets it apart from other settings.

She said: “It doesn’t really matter about age. Everyone is spoken to and addressed in the same way, which is maybe different from what young people experience at school.

“They’ve been able to have these very interesting and in-depth conversations that you might not have in a school-based setting or necessarily in a work-based setting.

“So, for all these young people to come together and talk about the things they are passionate about and that they care about and that affects them as well, that is one of the most important things”.

The young women used their diverse backgrounds to produce a toolkit that highlights the things they need to ensure that spaces are “comfortable, welcoming and inclusive”. Laurie describes the toolkit as a “snapshot” of things that the women felt were important to be able to identify within spaces.

It provides a short quiz for spaces to take to assess their suitability. It also provides advice on how to set up physical spaces for increased accessibility and how to maximise safety information.

The young women got their hands on physical copies of their work last week. The plan is that they will then be able to distribute them to Fife’s local businesses and organisations.

Laurie said: “The group is going to go round some organisations and hand them out, which I think is a really nice thing to do together”.

One of the lasting legacies of the group has been the relationships built up between the women who have taken part.

Laurie explained: “What really is one of the most important aspects is the journey they’ve all collectively gone on. They are all friends and they speak outwith the project. Potentially some of them work in the same sector and they’ve been able to network and connect with each other.”