“The beauty of standing up for your rights is others see you standing and stand up as well.” 

Cassandra Duffy

The EmpowHER groups over the past few weeks have been talking openly about pride and the LGBTQ+ community. We have explored the fact that pride is not just one big party – pride is a protest. Pride is an incredible example for the girls to see what social action and movements are and the successes they can have.

Proud to be allies

We have a group based within the Muslim community. The girls were exploring how they might make change in the world – in general – and began to get excited about supporting the LGBTQ+ community. One girl opened up and said during a planning session “I want to show this community that we are not are against them. People assume we do not support them – but most of us do. We want to show them that we support them, we care and love is love.” Flash forward a few weeks later and we are sat around, with our rainbow pens and rainbow postcards, writing messages of support that are going to be given out at Manchester Pride by the British Red Cross team in August.

When speaking to other groups about spreading kindness at pride, they leapt at the chance of getting involved! This soon escalated to there being over 50 messages of love and support ready to be handed out -take a look below the sheer about of messages we have lined up:

I am so proud of the girls. These young women are the next generation and are showing that through kindness, they will be inclusive and they will be allies of this community. Many have been so considerate and thoughtful about how they make change, they are taking extra postcards home to really think about what they write and how it might help someone. 

Proud to be ourselves

Another amazing group of EmpowHER young women also realised that supporting Pride was the perfect social action project for them. They wanted to use the visibility of Pride month to show everyone in their school what a joy it is to be an inclusive and open community and they weren’t afraid to get messy doing it!

We spoke about the importance of Pride, as a celebration of love and a protest for equality, and the girls explored how being LGBTQ+ can be a difficult and dangerous experience for some people. They learnt about how some people have to leave their homes because being open about their sexuality puts them in danger, and how the Red Cross supports people who might have had to seek asylum here for that reason.

Fuelled by what they’d learnt and their own experiences, the group wrote letters to our EmpowHER groups who wanted to support Pride, sharing why it was so important to them:

And to make a big impact in their last week of term, the EmpowHER girls organised their own Pride Event in the form of a ‘colour fight’ on the school field! They wanted an opportunity to celebrate together as a group, and show everyone that saw them how happy and proud they are to fly the rainbow flag!

It was an absolutely joyous occasion, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of young women leave an event looking so empowHERed!