Starting over.

If services directly affecting women were better funded, this would directly affect the numbers of children needing to enter the care system.

The number of reports I see where a birth mum has tried desparately to access services, to be told there's nothing there anymore or been signposted to a place 60 miles away that she cannot get to. The number of women sentenced to custodial sentences for crimes means that children enter the care system and rarely leave. (By the time she is released, she's an offender and this affects her employment, income, housing. If the children are in care, she's not eligible to get homed with them.

It makes sense for local and central government to fund these services better because it would save them huge amounts of money in the longer term. Added to that is the very human cost, impact on lives, impact on our society.

This is the first time I've ever heard of women's centres, by the way! Sound very different to the university "eat cake and chat celebrity role models" society I never returned to...

Seeing what's happened to all these supposedly female or feminist organisations towing the TWAW line - I think the two worst that stick in my mind are

1. Fawcett Society saying a parliament of 50/50 men/transwomen would be fine, and

1. Feminist Library saying that we should not attempt to seek the cause of women's oppression and only feminists who agree with them may visit

...well, it makes me see any potential feminist or women's organisation as a Trojan Horse waiting to happen.

Single-issue campaigning is what has resonated best with me - it has made me consider the bigger picture in a way that a general "come to our women's group, hurrah for women, Beyonce and the suffragettes" message never has.

Women's refuges should be something everyone is on board with - so campaigning might get a boost from the popular press. I know we often apologise for linking to the right-wing papers (which are the only ones that cover this stuff), but did I see that the Sun has picked up the Monklands story?

Nottingham fell at least 15 years ago, didn't it? All our Nottingham lesbians friends abandoned ship.

Also used to use a women's centre - they were really strict, no male partners, no male children over I think 12. But also included TW.

I used to live opposite a women's centre! In the 90s. It was so nice, as a teenaged lesbian in a new town, to meet women who were friendly and political.

I love some of these ideas.

It's possible one of the tiny silver linings of this whole Covid nightmare and women being forced out of the workplace in large numbers is we might have an opportunity to build even further on a woman focused movement. Strength and creativity often springs from adversity.

Yup.
I really wish I'd known all this when I was younger. I missed out on the opportunity to go to women's centres and meet with like minded women- I was just clueless! MN has been an education for me, along with a young woman I met who woke me up about the need for feminism.

Nottingham?

My local women's centre is captured. It ran a course by that TW wanting to teach women to orgasm.

I would like women's centres to be less obviously political. I know that life is politics and all that, but women of all political leanings, the privileged and the less so, all share certain needs. I'd like to see women's common ground as the priority rather than there differences.

I'd like to see properly funded and run Women's Centres with feminist values at their core and absolutely no truck with trans ideology. Binding constitutions that they are for biological women only. I want them in shiny prestigious buildings, not the ramshackle properties that so many women's centres of the past were located in. I want them properly funded, with guaranteed sources of income — not having to apply for tiny pots of money doled out by charities who change their priorities every year or two. Maybe a women's centre endowment fund would be something that a lot of us would be prepared to include in our wills. I want a tangible, prestigious public statement that women are valued and important.

A woman's centre in every city and large town could be the hub for a lot of the projects and actions and services already mentioned and help women learn to celebrate their sex. It would be government-funded as reparation for the shit we've all been put through over the last decade. I want any money left in Stonewall's coffers when it's shut down to to go to women's centres. Fines imposed on Twitter and Facebook and all those who have colluded in an organised attempt to deprive women of their rights and the money put into Women's Centres. I'm in a punitive mood!

The majority of funding from women's aid groups comes from Local and national government and is backed up by fundraising and grants from places like the Big Lottery. As such it is then tied to the conditions set by the funder. What we also need is an organisation that is tied to the services that can effectively lobby for what is needed and influence policy and best practice in favour of what is needed.
None of the mainstream organisations supposedly for women do this at the moment as they are too involved in other agendas.

X posts - yep!

I would love a women's disco. But... one that is inclusive to those of us of an age to get really bothered by loud thumpy music.
Not totally dark, not totally clubby music.

The one after London Reclaim the night used to be fun.

Cr groups are an easy one to sort- cost nothing and even over zoom they're a nice antidote to isolation.
I started a book group which worked as CR - unsure if it would have been as popular if marketed as CR at the time. It was really enjoyable and I think it was something that would work in lots of different contexts.

Much easier to start a group for CR than eg fund a women's aid, and if women have a better understanding of how inequality impacts on them, they might be more willing to advocate for better funding of women's aids too!

Really showing my age here but I would like some good old-fashioned consciousness raising groups. Actually some of the grassroots organisations that sprung up around the GRA sort of felt like that but that atmosphere of creativity, of righteous anger, of combined power, was absolutely intoxicating.

And lesbian clubs were AMAZING!

How about lesbian spaces- clubs, social groups etc? Most of them seem to have vanished off the face of the earth, including large and valuable gatherings like Mitchfest.

I thought domestic violence services were cut in U.K. because of the huge public debt caused by Covid? I don’t think that they were cut due to commitment or allies “not working” but rather their low priority to the U.K. Gov was most likely to due to a lack of allies and/or lack of commitment. Rishi Sunak is a potential ally whose commitment you’d want to secure.

sigh... If only the Women's Equality Party knew the definition of 'woman'.

It is a sane idea, its just not one thats been widely used by feminist campaigns, which tend to be grass roots campaigns that aren't supposed to be permanent. And there's never been an 'Official Feminist Head Office', because no ones speaks for everyone.

Perhaps we need a permanent head office? A way of drawing together disparate grassroots groups (and other entities like refuges). While they may come and go an overall body continues to exist. If the overall body was always made up of reps from grassroots groups hopefully it could maintain its purpose?

I hate to say it but I think we could learn from groups like Stonewall and Engender in how they lobby and establish credibility.

I don't see it as the Head Office of Feminism, more of a trade group made up from reps from an interested party.

The difficulty with commitment is the reality of women's lives, at base. The reason such a large scale operation hasn't been attempted, and the focus has remained on grass roots fire-fighting measures is because women are expected to clean up everyone else's shit, literally and metaphorically.

I'm articulate and analytical. I'm the kind of person people are happy to let lead them. But I've got kids with mental health problems, relatives with cancer, a minimum wage job, a whole raft of problems I'm not going to disclose here and there are only so many hours in the day. I am quite sure there are many, many other women exactly like me. Which is why the crowdfunders are made up of £10 donations from women who want to protect their rights but simply don't have the capacity to do more.

I wonder if JKR would be interested in establishing/backing a charitable fund? Esp given the ongoing threat to women only DV services and her own lived experience.