The office is cleaned, masks and gloves available, hand sanitizer is all over the place. Wise Women are back!
When we decided to close the office back in March, never in a million years did we imagine it would be for long 4 months. We have missed you all! Over the next few months we are hoping to get back to our new normal. Some of this will rely on government guidance, some on our partners working hard to provide us with safe spaces to meet. Suffice to say, as soon as it is safe to do so we will be returning to our fabulous groups, bringing women together to share their knowledge and ideas. All the more important after our long period of isolation.
We wanted to let you know what we have been up to during this period. The lockdown gave us time to look at funding and we have applied for a variety of grants and have already secured some to move our confidence building course online. This will not stop our usual face to face groups, but hopefully will provide opportunities, not only until we can meet up again, but also for women where this can be difficult for a variety of reasons. We will be piloting the online course over the next few months to make sure women find it as useful as our traditional groups, such as the Glasgow Women’s Voluntary Sector’s Open Space events.
Unfortunately it may be some time before we can restart the large Open Space events, but in the meantime we will be supporting Glasgow Women’s Voluntary Sector Network hold its first “Women in Conversation” online. This initial Conversation will be open to 20 women, but we hope this will grow over time. We just need to get used to the technology!! This first conversation will be on Coping with Covid, and we are looking forward to hearing the ways women have coped over the last 4 months and what they think would have helped them more.
Over the lockdown period we have started to put the Event Summaries from previous Open Space events online. These are handouts that give an overview of the themes and detail the ideas and action points the women raised at the events. The Event Summaries can be accessed on our website, but if you would like to order them individually or as a pack let us know, especially if you have attended the events. You might recognise some of the ideas!! Thank you to all the women who have attended over the last 11 years and contributed to this vital resource.
Although we have been locked down we have been keeping in touch. Some of the women have really helped out with developing our online work. We now have a blog, “Wise Women Talk About …..” and are receiving new material all the time. We hope this will be used by women to share their ideas and creativity. We are also in talks for linking this to our social media to hold exhibitions of artwork on our Instagram. We would love to be a space where women can display their work. Inspiring each other is vital, especially in challenging times.
We will be developing “Wise Women Talk About…” to an online forum and hope to attract women from across the globe to share their experiences with us. Women have already asked for topics such as, being active in your community, Black Lives Matter and legal protection for women. We are very excited to start working on these ideas and hope women, workers and decision makers all attend.
So we may have been locked down, but we have come back more motivated than ever. It will take us all time to get back into the swing of things, but together with you all we are still be a force to be reckoned with!
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