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"When in early 2009 we found out about the Rosa Fund we were so excited.  The Fund allowed us to ask for what we needed. "

Feminist webs is an intergenerational enterprise to design and produce online and physical ‘women and girls’ work spaces’.  We have been around for 5 years (our birthday is in July!) and in this time have developed a website, run numerous events, developed a resource pack for youth workers, and developed an archive. The archive includes oral histories that young women took from interviews with older feminists.

We are a collective, so are in the unique position to be able to do what makes us come alive, not what is flavour of the month with politicians and government agendas.

When in early 2009 we found out about the Rosa Fund we were so excited.  The Fund allowed us to ask for what we needed. It was one of the few funds that welcomed feminist work and was structured in a way which helped us achieve our outcomes and supported us, rather than expecting reams of monitoring reports.

We were excited because the theme of the funding was body image and we know that this issue impacts on most young women at some point and in a variety of complex and overlapping ways which we wanted to explore in a creative way.

The funding from Rosa enabled us to do a road-show around 5 areas of the North West: Tameside, Stockport, Halton, Wigan and Manchester.  We were also able to bring in extra funding from Awards for All and from Children England to match fund the project and deliver some additional training with youth workers in Lancashire.

At the road-shows we had 138 young women in total, and 30 youth workers.  In each area young women visited a number of workshops.  Every area worked with the artist Sarah Greaves to explore what body image meant to them and to create sections of a body image banner, exploring media pressure, make-up, pressure to be thin, feeling ugly, and why we should celebrate our diverse bodies.  The participants also worked with animator Tamzin Forster who worked with the whole group and a select number of young women on a residential to come up with an animation about body image including air-brushing and the effect of the cosmetic industry on young women’s sense of self. This animation, entitled 'More than a Face', can be viewed on Rosa's youtube channel here.

Tamzin Forster and our peer artist Hebe Phillips also worked with each group to create post cards to explore what body image means, what young women want and need today, and what feminism means to them.  These have been put into a booklet called ‘Post-Feminist’.

We were lucky to have additional sessions on each road-show including Chanje Kunda’s amazing poetry workshop which really empowered the young women in Manchester.  We had canoeing for young women in Tameside at the Water Adventure Centre, and a workshop on ‘if women ruled the world’ from the Big Comedy Shop at the Wigan event.

The impact we wanted was for young women to be able to ask questions and challenge society’s skewed view of the world.  We wanted them to feel that they could support each other and were stronger through being positive to one another.  We wanted them to learn to love their bodies more and to feel able to articulate what they want and need to make a real change in the wider world. 

We did an impact assessment of the project and initial work showed that 48% of participants reported having low confidence in their body image. By the end of the project this had lowered to 23%.

These are some of the things young women said about the project-

“Women are not alone!!  We've got Fem Webs!  Yess!!!!”
 “I have learnt that having a negative body image drains confidence.”
One young woman who volunteered on all the projects said, “If you would have asked me a year ago if I had a family I would probably have said no, but meeting everyone from feminist webs and such an amazing group of people shows me that I do have a family, you are my family.”

Without Rosa’s help this would not have been possible.  The work has been challenging and transformative and we hope Rosa continues and grows, helping other women become liberated in millions of ways.