SAFE SPACES NOW | LIVING PROOF x UN Women UK
REIMAGINING PUBLIC SPACES FOR WOMEN, GIRLS AND MARGINALISED GROUPS
HOW WE SCALED PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT TO CO-CREATE IDEAS ABOUT HOW PUBLIC SPACES CAN BE REIMAGINED TO MAKE WOMEN, GIRLS AND MARGINALISED GROUPS SAFE AND FREE AFTER LOCKDOWN.
THE CHALLENGE
- Help UN Women UK scale public engagement, especially youth, with their SAFE SPACES NOW campaign to ensure a large, diverse pool of women and girls’ voices are heard.
- Gather and codify their thoughts in a clear and meaningful way.
THE OUTCOME
- A portfolio of clear and detailed insights and ideas on how public spaces can be made safe for women and girls after lockdown, co-created with hundreds of women and girls.
- Pledges from contributors, such as MPs, the police, private industry, and public sector bodies, to stay engaged for the future.
- Two members of our Youth Board were invited to speak at Parliament about their experiences of working on the project and the importance of having a youth voice involved in decision-making.
OUR QUESTION: “HOW CAN WE REIMAGINE PUBLIC SPACES TO MAKE WOMEN AND GIRLS SAFE AND FREE AFTER LOCKDOWN?”
While Covid-19 shifted the distribution of violence and harassment against women and girls, in public and private spaces it continues. Behavioural economics teaches us that a life change is the easiest time to embed new behaviours. As lockdown eased, we had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redefine how public space is used; to create better public spaces FOR WOMEN, WITH WOMEN.
OBJECTIVES:
- Understand how women and girls experience public spaces (what works, what doesn’t, needs and challenges)
- Identify opportunity areas for change
- Co-create ideas for safer public spaces (how they look, how we move, how we act)
- Prioritise and visualise the ideas
We recruited 6 young people to our core team (alongside expert facilitators) to co-produce workshop and survey design, participant recruitment, insight analysis, content creation, idea co-creation and prioritisation.
We designed and delivered 5 insight and idea gathering workshops with hundreds of women and girls across the UK and created an online survey and digital voting tools to capture the experiences of hundreds more.
We commissioned 10 artists and crowd-sourced many more from the UN Women UK community, to visualise the ideas from the workshops and bring them to life, culminating in a virtual exhibition A SAFE SPACE.
At the final showcase we presented our findings to over 45 leaders from public activism, the police, politicians, nightclubs and corporate brands, asking for change and pledging to take action.
“I would have been concerned about risk inherent in the ideas without this Board there to review and test the ideas from a youth perspective. While we have a lot of topic expertise globally on survivor management, youth are the group that is MOST up-to-date with latest expressions of inclusion on the internet.”
— CLAIRE BARNETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, UN WOMEN UK
RESULTS
- 200 workshop participants, 2000 community research surveys, more than 800 digital votes.
- 16 insights, 4 opportunity areas for change and 150 ideas with 24 prioritised to make public spaces safe were identified.
- Findings presented to Parliament at an APPG for UN Women event to celebrate International Women’s Day which had over 270 attendees.
- 2 members of our Youth Board were invited to speak at the APPG event about their experiences of working on the project and the importance of having a youth voice involved in decision-making.
Watch Linda and Lucy’s speeches from Parliament over on our blog.
