Tell us about the work you do.
Our work is essentially looking after women’s health and their general wellbeing, plus economic wellbeing. Because if your finances are not right they impact your health, and if your health is not right, it impacts on you financially. We work with Black African women, predominantly but not exclusively. And we tend to focus on first generation immigrants because our children who were born here, people who are born here, can manoeuvre the systems more than we can, as we came from elsewhere.
There are so many issues that affect us, and there’s a lot of history that’s been made about our heritage. And our Caribbean brothers and sisters have been here for generations. We haven’t. So we are trying to create that space for ourselves. And for our children to carry on after us.
When you first come, if you are Black and African, you have two heritages – you have your own heritage, but you also have the British heritage here. When you go out, you are expected to be British. When you come in, your parents want you to be typical African. So it is very, very hard to balance the dual heritage. But it’s what it is. So we try to understand as parents and also understand our children have to do that and be proud of it, be proud of who you are, but also embrace the British culture because you’re here and you’re integrating in the community.
And then we have one that does counselling. We talk about counselling in the African way, what it means. Some people won’t open up to certain people. For example, some women will not talk to a man, whoever it is. So we know that it has to be a female counsellor. It has to be somebody who looks and sounds like them. So we try to make it culturally appropriate.
And then we have Money Matters. Very different, again, from where we come from. So again, like the dual heritage, we try to help people understand the benefit system here, encourage them to work, and also deal with a lot with people who have no recourse to public funds.
We are also part of Greater Manchester System Changers, which for a long time, until the very near future, has been funded by Lankelly Chase. And it’s about us creating our own alternatives. Naming the issues that are affecting us, but also trying to see what happens when there is no money – what relationships have we got? Over the last four or five years we’ve been meeting with different organisations. We had the Dream Weavers festival, which was four days of bringing organisations that have been supported, to keep people alive basically, through the Covid years and the aftermath of Covid.
And other organisations in the partnership focus on education. It’s very different again. In Africa, reports are very clear over there. If it’s out of 100%, they show you got, for example, 70%. So you get a clear understanding. Here, it’s quite different. And parents really, really struggle. Imagine if you don’t speak English and you have to support your child. It’s almost practically impossible.
What else do we do? We do a lot of research because, again, as Black African women, all our data on issues that affect us have been bundled into the BAME community, but we are very, very different. And in the BAME community we still come at the bottom because we don’t understand what’s going on in the system. So we’ve done our own research, we’ve held focus groups, we work with women, we do a lot of work to say, okay, these are our issues, and we are the best-suited people to get ourselves out of this. And we try to do our best in doing that.
So it sounds like you do a lot!
Yeah, we do a lot. And we’ve invested a lot in the African community. Because, imagine, when you come from where you come from, some people are economic migrants, others are forced – there is a lot of forced migration. Others economic, others abuse. So everybody’s escaping something, because nobody wants to be in this cold weather for nothing.
That’s a really good point.
Yeah, nobody. But we’re all here because something has pushed us out of where we were. And that has a lot to do with colonial history, current exploitation, modern slavery, social injustice that’s happening where we come from, but perpetuated by the West. So all of that.
So when we talk about our heritage, we work with women, we look a lot at intersectionality. So we look at the woman in the simplest of forms and say, listen, this is who you are. Starting from your name. Why am I called Rose? I’ve got my own name that links me to my culture. But I’m called Rose because I was colonised. Why do I speak good English? I speak Luganda as well, which is my mother tongue. But in our country English is the whatever language. Britain, the United Kingdom, has colonised a third of the world. And still is.
When we talk about our own heritage, we have been made to hate our own hair. There is no black dolls until very recently, all dolls are white and blonde and looking like Barbie and all that. So those are all the things when we talk about heritage. We need to tell our children, you are just as beautiful as you are. Your language is as beautiful. I keep telling my children, you need to love your language because it’s your first identity.
So there’s a lot that we do, a lot that we cover. And we are based in Oldham. You’re welcome anytime to come and talk to our women.
You’re going to see our choir, the SAWN choir, they’re going to be singing shortly. They’ve been singing for two years now and some of the songs they have composed, and they sing in different languages, different choruses. So they bring a chorus and sing it out, all because we want to maintain who we are in this very difficult situation. And also embrace and accept, because none of the people here colonised us. None of them here. But the history is there, and we need to address it and work from it together.
If you could wave a magic wand and get to your perfect system of all of these cultures and histories being properly represented in Greater Manchester, what would that look like?
I can only use the analogy of being a parent. I’m a mother of three. My son is 24. He’s finished university, he is a psychotherapist. My daughter is turning 19, she’s at Leicester University doing neuroscience. My son is 16, he just started his A-Levels. Now I, as a parent, have given my children what I think of as equal opportunities, but they’re different. They’ve been given the same opportunities – we’ve fed them, we’ve looked after them. What they do with what we’ve given them is up to them.
Now imagine the unfairness in this country. People are being labelled – you are an asylum seeker, then from an asylum seeker you become a refugee, you’re a migrant, you’re… I don’t even want to go to the health labels, all of them, because I don’t agree with them. Everybody is an individual. The autistic spectrum, ADHD, all those labels, we don’t need them. Let’s see the person and give them the equal opportunities and equity, because if you’ve got a learning difficulty, we can’t put you on the same level as somebody who doesn’t. So for me, a perfect world, a perfect system would be to meet people at their point of need and give them opportunities to be who they want to be, which is a long, long way off.
The last couple of questions are about how to get to that utopia. What is it that you would like to call for from others, to help you in the mission that you’re trying to achieve?
Just equity. Equity. Because everybody is fighting something. Everybody is fighting something. It’s just to meet that person at their point of need and support them. So we don’t all have to have the same outcomes. But are we given opportunities to be? Like I said about the children, are we given the same opportunities? Everybody will become something. But the opportunities are equal.
Finally, is there anybody that you would single out as doing work that you admire, that you would recommend we speak to?
Oh, that would be my pastor. She’s a white British woman I’ve known for 21 years. She just sticks to doing what Jesus did. No religion, just love, pure love. I’ve learned a lot from her and I do what I do because of her. Her name is Pastor Pamela Saville.
She’s impacted loads of lives, African lives. To the point that, she sold her house to look after people. Every penny she gets goes back into people. She’s invested in people, I can’t tell you how much.
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Featured image: Alice Toomer-McAlpine
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