Bringing together community groups from around Trafford, the event celebrated the history, diversity and strength of women: and highlighted those campaigning for women’s issues

Trafford Rape Crisis was privileged to be invited along to the International Women’s Day celebratory event at Limelight Old Trafford, a unique community space from Trafford Housing Trust which opened in December 2017.

It was a hugely successful and diverse event, welcoming a wide range of different community groups and causes to join the international celebration of women everywhere. Activities on the night ranged from belly dancing and yoga to poetry reading, live drawing and more.

As an organisation, we choose to bring a creative element to our own stand, creating our own living art piece. We used ‘BESS’: the acronym of our tagline which highlights our mission, ‘Believe, Empower, Support, Speakout’. We asked women to add their fingerprint and positive messages for other women, bringing to life the solidarity of sisterhood. Here are just a few of our favorites:

We were also proud to make our contribution to the Trafford Red Box Project, coordinated by the Trafford Council social work team. The collection of sanitary products will help those struggling with #PeriodPoverty, or the difficulty to afford sanitary products each month.

“It’s been a fantastic opportunity for us to be at the heart of the community and connect with both women and organisations from the Trafford area,” says Manju, Volunteer Services Coordinator. 

“We’re really grateful to all the women who came and contributed to our BESS art piece and stopped to talk with us. The whole event had a really strong sense of solidarity and sisterhood, celebrating women and championing those causes and issues that matter to them the most. But also, the more we can be seen as an organisation, the more women we can reach and support.

“Limelight is an amazing flagship development and the variety of community-based support services and facilities they offer is just incredible. It’s so important that community organisations have a space and events like this to come together and collaborate to drive change. We’re already planning further partner projects with some of the organisations we’ve managed to network with here at Limelight. We’d like to thank the whole team for organising this incredible event.”

About Limelight:

Limelight, from Trafford Housing Trust, originally opened in December 2017 and offers community facilities and events, an on-site health hub, library, pharmacy, opticians, hair and beauty hub, café and nursery, which are all open to the public. The building also offers extra-care apartment living with Shared Ownership through Laurus Homes for the over 55’s and a range of individual care packages and support.

The flagship development also recently won two awards at the 2018 Inside Housing Development awards – Best Older People’s Housing Development and Best Affordable Housing Development – and received a highly commended in the Best Residential Development category.