Community Building

At the heart of the United Mothers project is the wish to bring together women from our local community, native and migrant voices all in a space of sharing and learning. United Mothers itself offers women-only English classes free of targets, certificates and pressure to allow women often excluded from English class to be able to learn in a friendly atmosphere, no matter where their origin of home is, or their cultural or spiritual backdrop.

Our outreach work is crucial for bridging gaps, offering women and their families chance to feel integral and valued as members of our local community. It also offers our native families chance to reflect on the work of Beyond the Page and their established position in the post Brexit and post Farage community of Thanet.

Our outreach work currently has two main strands:- the Hands Of Friendship Tree and our Power of Women festival event.


 

Hands of friendship tree

Hands of Friendship Tree




Inspired by the United Mothers logo design, the Hands of Friendship Tree activity has great potential for finding friends around Thanet of all colours and textures. Multicultural and intergenerational, its success has been in its simplicity.



The Hands Of Friendship Tree tours the Isle of Thanet gathering our ideas of what friendship means to us. Each person creates their own hand, decorating with stickers, words, poems and pictures, and blossoming the tree into a fully multicoloured Tree of Friendship extending hands of kindness within the community.
So far the Hands of Friendship Tree has appeared at school Summer and Winter fairs, Margate Rocks Against Racism, the Windmill Community Gardens Strawberry Fair, a local refuge for trafficked women and St Phillips Church for their Holiday at Home week.

If you would like to invite the Hands of Friendship Tree to your event please contact
Sheila or Jodi.





Hands Up Speak Up! event

Nestled in the safety of the local Power of Women Festival, our Hands Up Speak Up! event on the 10th March 2018 was a fantastic success. 150 local community members of all nations came together to celebrate their understanding of and participation in United Mothers. Raising our voices, tuning our ears and engaging our hearts to the need for social engagement across boundaries. Produced by Beyond the Page, Wantsum Arts and Tracey Thompson Arts, Hands Up Speak Up! told the story of the United Mothers project so far in Thanet - the resistance, the challenges and the friendships created and shared when working across cultures and in the face of ignorance, fear and racism.

 

Songwriter: Pat Humphries
Audio & Video: Graham Sykes
Choir:  Sing Your Socks Off


Breaking Down Walls

Breaking down walls

Breaking Down Walls – Inspired by the metaphor to build walls between Nations and break down barriers between people, Beyond the Page and Wantsum Arts bought in fantastic Edo bricks – large scale eco friendly lego type building bricks. Children and adults alike have loved building walls, dinosaurs, houses, chairs, castles and then knocking them down to reconstruct something anew.

Edo bricks

Edo bricks are an ingenious invention. Children and adults love building the bricks as well as anything you can build with them. These have been a major success at our Summer fairs and the Rocks Against Racism event that we attended with our United Mothers.