Our newest recruit, Eilidh, shares her experience so far.
I couldn’t believe the energy of the five women squeezed into the tiny office in the Vassal Centre. With ideas that far surpassed the 45–minute meeting-time, my first day left me reeling with excitement.
There’s so much to do, but so little time and resource to do it. The Disabled Women Take Action (DWTA) project, led by Helen at BWV and Cora at WECIL, is rich and necessary enough to be a charity in its own right. Troy, the volunteer and training coordinator, dedicates herself to creating a personalised volunteer programme — a job worthy of a whole team. Sophie does communications for the whole organisation without much budget. Dahlia organises and facilitates workshops in one fell swoop. Katy oversees the whole thing, and her calendar is mildly horrifying.
So, what’s on the to-do list? To start with, we want to get our public toilets unlocked, for all the mums and disabled folks who’ve had access to their go-to parks and public places robbed from them. We want to create resources to tackle sexual harassment on buses and in taxis so women can travel (at least a bit) more safely at night. We want to provide a range of events for women’s empowerment and wellbeing. And of course, we’re running our large annual International Women’s Day event at City Hall in March next year.
My job is to help support part of the Council’s answer to the cost-of-living crisis: ‘Welcoming Spaces’. These are like public living rooms – at the most basic level they provide warmth and somewhere to sit and perhaps have a cup of tea – but they also have a range of services and workshops for all. We hope to mobilise a team of volunteers to run women-only time slots within the welcoming spaces. There are 70 welcoming spaces, and that number is growing. I’m also putting together a directory to collate all the services for women across Bristol into one place.
Even if Bristol Women’s Voice achieves just a fraction of the things it sets out to do, it’ll still have done so much. The team work tirelessly, juggling multiple jobs and motherhood, their passion bleeding into doing overtime. But their enthusiasm is contagious, and when your work is as important as this, it doesn’t really feel like work at all.
