Migrant women becoming ‘stronger together’ through the arts: Creating Ground

Introduction

In this article we describe the work of Creating Ground focusing on the journey of the Stronger Together Leaders showing the personal, public, policy and practice impact and importance of our community organising work. We reflect on our use of participatory arts, social action and training to bring migrant women together, improve wellbeing and create change for these women, at a personal and a community level. We show how women from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds share common intersectional experiences of hostile environment policies. It is this shared experience that provided the basis for campaigning on the poor condition of temporary accommodation for families. We describe the process of empowering the women's collective leadership skills for collective action, highlighting some of the complexities involved in working across intersectional differences to undertake living activism. We also document the importance of participatory methods including theatre techniques and creative arts for building collective voices and stories to show the true reality of people affected by the immigration system and to raise awareness of the hostile environment. The discussion concludes with #NoticeUs, our temporary accommodation campaign and its impact, as an example of living activism in practice. Our collaborative approach is creating individual and social change for ourselves and our communities, and building engagement with members of the public and policy makers on the hostile environment.

Who are we?

Creating Ground was established in 2016, as a not-for-profit organisation that works with women from migrant backgrounds to promote intersectional anti-racist cross-cultural awareness, learning and sharing across different cultures in South East London through collaborative arts and educational projects. We use participatory arts, social action and training to bring people together, improve wellbeing and create individual and social change. We understand social action as the ability of migrant women from different backgrounds to come together to improve their lives and solve the problems that are important in their communities. We believe in recognising and valuing people's agency of action and representation. Co-production, participation and active engagement of all the women/people who come to our sessions and projects is very important to us. With our work, we are keen to shift the power dynamics concerning the traditional narratives around migrants/refugees/asylum seekers, which stereotype and/or pathologize these groups or privilege and prioritise situated knowledge production of these groups by academic experts over and above community experts with lived experience. These community experts should have their power of agency recognised and encouraged but there are inherent tensions stemming from the way that they are intersectionally marginalised and excluded from policy, practice and academic spaces.

Using arts, we encourage people to share their intersectional experiences, express their feelings and overcome difficulties tackling hot topics and issues. In 2020–21, for example, we supported 124 people across our core activities including: My Creative Skills workshops, weekly yoga, community leadership training and online courses. We also delivered 146 online sessions as Stronger Together Leaders. In recognition of our community organising, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdown period, we won an award by South London Citizens for ‘Best Organising Institution’.

Empowering community leadership skills

We believe that community organising leadership is based on the premise that people come together in a democratic way to identify community problems and solutions, and to take action to make the solutions a reality. Community organising empowers people by actively involving them in the solution of their own problems: mapping and sharing these, identifying those in power and engaging with them through consultation and advocacy towards a common goal (Pyles, 2021). Our community organising is influenced by a feminist conceptual organising model that supports the voice, agency and empowerment of women in all their diversity. We adopt an inclusive approach to women's leadership that draws on key feminist principles of feminist organising, which is a concern with power, intersectional oppression, and pathways to liberation; non-hierarchical and consensual decision-making, valuing the group process and diverse experiences, coalition-building, a concern beyond single-issue organising and a commitment to collective and individual healing from oppression (Dominelli, 1995). We recognise that having an inclusive approach reveals the complexities around intersectional differences. Our inclusive approach also means embracing differences of opinions and that these will result in disagreements over the course of action to take. However, we use these opportunities to hold frank, open and sometimes difficult conversations to talk through any differences and tensions, and always with the end outcome of identifying a solution. This entails expressing disagreement respectfully, practising active intersectional listening and showing empathy towards the other person and their opinions. This process of reflecting, sharing and disagreement reinforces our inclusive culture as one that embraces and celebrates our differences, including intersectional differences in experience, backgrounds and ways of thinking.

We also include antiracist and intersectional analysis that reflects on the unique positionality of racialised women in community organising (Erel et al., 2018). Anti-racism is the active process of identifying and challenging racism, by changing systems, organisational structures, policies and practices, and attitudes to redistribute power in an equitable manner. Intersectionality is a concept, methodology and frame coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (Hill-Collins, 1990) to describe the ways in which race, class, gender, and other aspects of our identity ‘intersect’, overlap and interact with one another, informing the way in which individuals simultaneously experience oppression and privilege in their daily lives interpersonally and systemically. Intersectionality promotes the idea that aspects of our identity do not work in a silo. Intersectionality, then, provides a basis for understanding how these individual identity markers work with one another to produce an ‘intersectional experience that is greater than the sum of race and gender’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Operationalising anti-racism, and intersectionality, an anti-racist intersectional frame recognises all the different ways people and communities experience racism with respect to their identities. An anti-racist intersectional analysis provides a conceptual tool to examine institutional and systemic oppression that racialised migrant communities face because of their interlocking race and ethnic identities, while providing a guiding approach for working with and in communities and systems to create a more just and equitable society. An anti-racist intersectional analysis offers an action-oriented framework. We apply anti-racist intersectionality to critiquing UK hostile environment policies and its treatment of people and communities while providing a guiding approach for how to work towards a more just and equitable society.

In October 2019 we started a group called Stronger Together to find out more about community organising and ways that we can support each other to find solutions to problems that we were experiencing in our local community. We were awarded funding from a local organisation, Near Neighbours, to organise a women and leadership course run by Greenwich Citizens for eleven women from different migrant backgrounds for 12 weeks. For context, Greenwich Citizens is a member of South London Citizens, the second oldest chapter of Citizens UK, a community organising alliance of 400 plus civil and community organisations across the UK. This course provided us with skills in community organising, leadership and a space for us to discuss all the intersecting issues in the community that matter to us as migrant women and to help us think of ways to act in our community. We learnt about the basic tools of organising and explored issues that affect many more people and communities like ours, particularly around housing and access to social welfare services for migrants. Every session meeting culminated in an agreement by the women agreeing on next actions for change. At the centre of the sessions, were three powerful phrases that also influenced our later community organising and leadership: ‘nurture love’, ‘speak the truth’, ‘seeking justice and freedom’. These words are taken from a song that we co-created as part of a project with theatre company Theatre Témoin where we built a giant female puppet representing the different intersectional experiences of the women in the group. The song talks about a woman who is supported through her journey by other women. Song as a form of celebration and introduction is worldwide, and offers a way of understanding about where we fit into our natural world and connect with each other. It also reflects a ritual of community. For people new to participating in groups, adding our song can help them join in more quickly and create a bond to the community energy a little faster. When using a song you bring associations, beyond just the words of the music, into the ritual. Bringing aspects of music into your ritual can help engage people on many levels, bring a deeper awareness in the moment, as well as a stronger connection to the ritual's meaning and intention.

This funding also enabled us to become a member of Citizens UK, a national people power alliance of diverse local communities working together for the common good. Their mission is to develop local leaders, strengthen local organisations which are the lifeblood of their communities and make change. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdown was announced, we had to switch from our weekly meetings in person to meeting online, which was a new and foreign way of us being together. We quickly adapted to meeting in this virtual world and started to discuss very important issues such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of migrants and the intersecting challenges we faced or were facing in the UK. We welcomed new women to our group and introduced new ways of doing community organising and leadership using online spaces.

Incredibly, being in a virtual space in such a difficult time made us connect more with each other. The virtual space created a digital intimacy as it provided an alternative space and place for us to meet feely, within the context of social distancing which was focused on limiting interactions between individuals. The digital space meant that meetings took place within our own homes, and this sense of familiarity created a sense of ease and comfort. We also establish intimacy among members, by having warm up games at the start of each session and doing activities together at the same time such as cooking classes, arts and craft sessions, participatory theatre and yoga. We used Google Jamboard to collate and collect data from our mind-mapping sessions and planning sessions where we collectively decided our activities and actions. We focused even more, we supported each other, and we became stronger together. During the online workshops we shared and documented our reflections on ‘the world as it is’ and we identified what we wanted to work on together to get to ‘the world as it should be' using the framework in Figure 1. In terms of the former, our reflections included the intersectionality of: isolation, lack of opportunities, immigration and housing problems, hostile environment, poor mental health due to challenges faced. And in terms of the latter, we focused on the intersectionality of equity and equality, good mental health, supporting network, safety and stability.

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Figure 1.

Our action triangle.

Building collective voice: stories on the UK's hostile environment

‘As most of us are migrants, joined with citizens, we have found strength in each other when we have been broken by the system. Now we are finding our voice together to speak and create awareness.’

After only a few months of meeting online, we were able to use these reflections to proudly co-produce a short film Finding Strength: Our stories of the UK's Hostile Environment’, working collaboratively to tell our stories as migrants in the UK from varying perspectives with support from Near Neighbours, Citizens UK and the Centre for Communities and Social Justice at the Institute for Inclusive Communities and Environments, University of Greenwich.

We worked with Anna Merryfield, a participatory filmmaker to make a short 5-min film and made this film using a collaborative approach to filmmaking. This means that every member of the group participated equally in all of the different stages required to make the film. This included the initial exploratory sessions where we discussed the themes we wanted to tackle; to considering different approaches to depicting these themes; submitting footage in response to a task set each week; writing the script; deciding how to tell our stories; and assessing multiple edits of the film and giving feedback on suggested revisions and suggesting changes. Given that collaboration is fundamental to the way we operate as a group, it was obvious and felt right for us to take this approach to making the film. The result was an incredible display of the diverse talents possessed by our group, who contributed poetry, songs and beautiful footage.

The whole process was underpinned by the Citizens UK framework: the world as it is, the world as it should be, and what we can do to take us from one state to the other. ‘The World as it is, The World as it Should Be’ community framework focused on key actions community organisers should take to move from ‘the world as it is’ towards achieving a better, more fair and equitable world i.e., the world as it should be. This framework allowed a group of talented migrant women to come together to tell their stories of the ‘world as it is’. Within this context, the women shared experiences of the UK hostile environment immigration policies, and its impact. The stories reflected on the barriers they faced with the immigration system, and how this resulted in a range of multiple intersecting disadvantages. This ranges from the intersectionality of social exclusion, poverty and deprivation, barriers to accessing health, social care, and education, poor physical and mental health, precarious living and employment conditions, and a lack of sense of purpose. All of these issues have a devastating effect on women's self-worth, trust, confidence, and general wellbeing.

The film was intended to show people and policy makers the ‘world as it is’. In other words, the everyday lived reality of how people are affected by the immigration system, particularly No Recourse to Public Funds. The aim was to create awareness of this policy and its dehumanising effects. Also, to stimulate a response with public audiences to call for an end to such policies and to replace these with ones that are rooted in humanity, fairness, compassion, empathy, inclusion, equality and dignity for all. In essence, we wanted to use the film as a catalyst to bring us closer to the ‘world as it should be’. The film is an educational resource that we use to speak out against and educate diverse stakeholders on the detrimental impact of the hostile environment to individuals and communities. So far, we have shown the film to local authority policymakers, health and social care agencies and local community organisations that support migrant groups.

As part of an online screening event of the film, one of our group members spoke about making the film, ‘We all have become a force and voice for positive changes in our society. We have become the roaring thunder in our various immediate communities to bring to light the challenges faced by many, especially in the hostile environment. And we have also helped create a soft ground whereby the beauty of our community is revealed. The Finding Strength film has helped us to not give up and constantly reminds us of our courage and perseverance day by day.’ (Stronger Together member, Finding Strength Screening, 2020).

Some of our Stronger Together Leaders have also formed a Trainers group so that we can share our learning with other groups and organisations and to raise awareness on the intersecting issues affecting migrants in the UK bringing our own perspective and expertise. We have successfully co-designed and co-delivered about 12 different training sessions including to a group of migrant women, a group of academics, a group of GPs, a group of teachers from Italy, 4 groups of year 6 students from a local Greenwich primary school and a group of teenagers.

Through the Trainers programme, we created opportunities for dialogue between the women and other sections of society such as academics, public sector officials, teachers as a way of raising awareness of the policy, bridging the empathy gap, and to ensure to bridge the gap and have equal power and say in discussions that focus on migrant issues. It is particularly important that these shared dialogue with practice and community stakeholders contribute to changing the narrative that sees migrant women as only vulnerable, passive and recipients of someone's support. We want to show migrant women's power, authority, their resilience, knowledge, experiences, and expertise in the face of hostile environment policies. We want women to realise the potential of increased confidence and for the women to be active agents of change.

To this end, we are currently working on developing forum theatre scenes, rehearsals pictured in Figure 2, around health access and disparity for migrants on invitation to present to the South East London Integrated Care System Board.

Integrated care systems (ICSs) are the new NHS structure, a partnership of organisations that come together to plan and deliver joined up health and care services, and to improve the lives of people who live and work in their area.

42 ICSs were established across England on a statutory basis on 1 July 2022.

The Integrated Care Board is the board responsible for developing a plan for meeting the health needs of the population, managing the NHS budget and arranging for the provision of health services in the ICS area. The establishment of ICBs resulted in clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) being closed down. Figure 2 shows the group rehearsing the forum theatre scenes.

‘We were able to use the lockdown as an opportunity to be positive and inventive. We did not allow ourselves to become weighed down by misery that can cause mental health problems. We made art, we made face coverings, we taught each other how to bake and some many other new skills useful for the family. These skills made us active and gave us merry hearts. Thereby defeating the gloom and doom of the pandemic. A merry heart stays alert and alive through true love, unity and sharing each other's burden.’ (Stronger Together member speaking at a Celebrating Communities event, 2020)

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Figure 2.

Theatre workshop photos.

#NoticeUs campaign: Temporary accommodation campaign

In the post-pandemic period, with continued support from the University of Greenwich and Citizens UK, we continued to meet regularly. Following on from the film, we decided to start to work on something tangible that we could have the power to change hostile environments practically. During workshops where we talked about all the problems still being experienced in our communities, we narrowed down the issues mostly affecting our lives through discussion and shared learning. We went from ‘the problem’, the hostile environment to breaking down the intersectional ‘problem’ into different issues: e.g., limited access to health and social care; poor housing conditions; food poverty; limited access to free school meals for NRPF children; lack of free or affordable wifi access to support children with their homework. We thought that we needed to be both strategic and realistic with what we could possibly win with our campaign due to the size of the group and our experience in community organising. Our strategy for deciding our campaign was based on the understanding that we are currently in a period where the central UK Government has an anti-immigration stance. Therefore, we wanted to focus our engagement on local organisations and statutory bodies who would be more sympathetic to migrant communities because they had more direct experience of supporting migrant families with NRPF and would be more open to working with us to identify solutions that improve services and support for these families. We decided to look at all the practical issues and decided on a campaign that was winnable and we all cared about.

We decided to focus on temporary accommodation as many of the women in our group had experience of it. We called our campaign #NoticeUs, as a metaphorical play of words to describe both the issue of notice period that we wanted to address through our campaign and also because we wanted policymakers, practitioners and members of the public to notice our campaign and to also notice us as strong, powerful, resilient women who work together to create change in our communities. Inspired by solidifying the name of our campaign, participants expressed themselves in artwork like in Figure 3. For the campaign launch we invited guests to join us in this creative activity pictured in Figure 4.

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Figure 3.

Art activity inspired by our #NoticeUs campaign.

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Figure 4.

#Notice us hands image.

In summary, our campaign aims to unite women who have had similar intersectional experiences navigating the temporary accommodation system in the UK with two important asks to Greenwich Council:

Fair notice periods for people living in temporary accommodation

Eviction notice periods: to develop a reasonable and fair eviction notice period charter that allows families to properly prepare themselves and their children to move.

Length of stay: to give families an indication of how long they will be in temporary accommodation so that they can plan their lives.

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Figure 5.

Mapping key issues concerning temporary accommodation.

Working alongside theatre practitioner, Rachel Griffiths, we used different participatory theatre techniques to express ourselves, tell our stories, and to find ways to connect with the people we wanted to reach, which included other migrant women who have had similar experiences, policy makers, and other communities who may not be aware of the intersecting struggles people face navigating the immigration system. After weeks of meeting online and experimenting with creative and physical forms of telling our stories, we decided upon creating a series of short performances using a shoe shop as a metaphor to convey our message. We used this metaphor to reflect the process of having to buy shoes as something that could be considered to be a basic need that most people can relate to. In similar fashion, having a home is also a basic need, and so this has the potential to gain public support and attention. Many of the women in our group had experience of, or are currently living in temporary accommodation, and so it was a shared intersectional experience. The scenes being placed in a shop with dialogues between a shoe keeper and a shoe buyer enabled all the women to feel less vulnerable, less exposed and able to utilise irony and humour to tackle a very serious issue affecting their lives.

‘Eventually we will get to the policy makers to even look at it [our performance] and see how there could be a change in the policy. And with that change it could be of help, it could diminish more of mental health problems, that could be a menace to the government.’ (Stronger Together member 2021)

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Figure 6.

Video excerpt from shoe shop performance.

We held a launch event of The Shoe Shop with invited partner organisations, funders and the general public in October 2021

The feedback received was very positive and encouraging for our group:

‘Beautiful, playful, yet poignant. Stories that need to be heard to be understood by citizens in the UK who have no idea how dissolved the support systems are in the country. Very moving - and importantly informative about the difficulties and unfairnesses faced by those seeking nothing more than a home of their own.’

Our journey does not end here. Following on from the performance, and with funding from the Critical Social Policy Solidarity Fund, the Stronger Together Leaders worked on making a film, titled ‘Light the Way’ with filmmaker Anna Merryfield on their leadership journey to inspire and encourage more women to work together for social change.

Stronger together impact of community organising and leadership

We are proud of the way in which our community organising as Stronger Together Leaders has wider significance and impact at interconnecting levels. The following discussion demonstrates the impact of the practice, policy, public and personal impact of our leadership.

Practice Impact: As noted above, The Stronger Together Leaders organised and ran more than 12 public events and training/sessions including meeting a group of GPs and health professionals, teachers, artists, academics to raise awareness and gain public support. They also attended the Greenbelt Festival in August 2022 where they presented ‘The Shoe Shop’ to a national audience.

Policy Impact: At the South London Citizens UK Delegates Assembly in February 2022, our campaign was voted top priority campaign, and received support from the entire Greenwich Alliance comprised of 12 delegates/organisations. This meant that we could present our campaign to the future council leaders of Royal Borough of Greenwich. The Delegates Assembly is important because it is where all Greenwich Citizens member institutions meet to decide together the issues to prioritise and the campaigns to work on. Following on from the majority vote to take our campaign forward by the member institutions, on 25th April 2023 we presented our campaign and our key asks for temporary accommodation to the Leader of the Council at the Royal Borough of Greenwich Election Assembly. This experience reflects how we were able to secure a seat at the decision making table. The Leader and the ‘then’ leader of the Council committed to working with us to create an eviction notice charter and provide wifi to all temporary accommodations. However, following local elections a new Leader was appointed, and we have had to begin the process of securing a commitment to working with us to secure our priorities. The process has already started through a meeting and interview with the new Leader of the Council, where we restated our key aims, and a call for further action. This led to us being invited to the Council's Housing Scrutiny Panel Meeting to present our campaign and key asks; Also working with the Council to co-design a survey on wifi use for residents living in temporary accommodation within the borough. In May 2023, the Borough of Greenwich announced that it will start a pilot to provide free wifi access via the provision of free sim cards to all living in temporary accommodation, and we can trace this directly back to our campaign.

Since the beginning of our campaign, we have received funding and support from the University of Greenwich. We now have the support from Trust for London and their network to see our asks to Greenwich Council become a reality, a win, and to expand our campaign.

Public Impact: We have also attended the Greenbelt Festival, in August 2022. This was a two-day event where they presented the ‘The Shoe Shop’ and #NoticeUs campaign to a diverse audience member to raise public awareness of the hostile environment and the poor conditions of temporary accommodation.

Personal impact

Developing community organising and leadership skills has increased confidence, empowerment, and social inclusion of the Stronger Together Leaders, their journeys as leaders depicted in Figure 7. Before the training some of them felt that they did not have the self-belief that they could affect change to improve their lives and local communities.

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Figure 7.

Image of the Stronger Together Journey illustrated by a Stronger Together Leader.

This reflects the personalised nature of political activism, and that the personal is political, reinforcing the feminist notion that women's personal intersectional experiences are rooted in and shaped by their political circumstances and intersectional gender inequality. Also, how women's intersectional experience of oppression, individually and as a group, is shaped by the social, economic, and political structure beyond their control.

Through the training and leadership activities, all the women felt more confident and empowered in applying skills developed together for community-led solutions; ‘It's given me the confidence that I can apply my communication skills gained to talk to others going through similar experiences’ (C.). The women felt motivated to continue to participate in their communities on key social issues and to mobilise community members into community action for change.

Conclusion

In conclusion our work as part of Stronger Together Leaders shows the importance of working together for community action and local change. We reflect on the importance of participatory methods and creative arts as tools that help us to share our thoughts and experiences with each other. The participatory and inclusive approaches we use to describe the experiences and impact of hostile environment policies mean that we are able to create collective stories that shed light on the challenges faced by migrant communities, and importantly, do not exploit the women as passive victims in need of support from others but rather reveal the strength, power and resilience of these women as community leaders and activists. As we have highlighted in our discussion, being together in such a difficult time such as COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown helped us to become stronger together and to decide to take action to change against intersecting unjust situations that migrant women encounter in their everyday lives as a result of the hostile environment policies.

Through our work at Creating Ground we have aimed to improve women's wellbeing so that after looking inside ourselves and gaining trust in ourselves, we can look together at the world outside to make it better. We are so grateful and lucky to be supported and work together with many partners including: English for Action, Action for Refugees in Lewisham, South London Refugee Association, Lewisham Refugee Migrant Network, Trust for London, NHS Greenwich. It is through these collaborations that we can reach more people to create more cross-cultural awareness and dialogue.

‘Through creativity, education, arts, cultural awareness, environmental awareness, therapeutic tools, endurance, courage, love, promotion of peace, and grace; we have become stronger together!!!’ (Stronger Together member, Finding Strength Screening, 2020)