Our next developmental steps in this project involve continuing our relationship with Ropes & Twines, the venue where we are hosting our first workshop in early June; networking and building connections is a major priority for us at this stage. Maintaining open lines of communication with potential collaborators, charities, and venues is crucial to building our project and helping it grow. We plan to maintain and strengthen our relationship with RASA, and, looking ahead, are keen to expand our outreach by partnering with additional charitable organisations that align with the causes we believe in; we want Commonality Grrrl to progress further into a charity-oriented, creative initiative that helps raise money for important causes whilst also creating safe and open spaces for people.

Currently, our first workshop is centred around collage-making, a practice that is directly connected to our beginning inspirations of feminist artwork; the handmade aesthetic of collage resonates with the activist roots of our project and also acts as a medium through which people who attend our events can express their ideas in simple, easy to grasp ways. One of the key strengths of collage, and one of the reasons we are particularly drawn towards it, is its accessibility. Those taking part don’t need any prior artistic experience or specialist skills, compared to painting or pottery workshops, which can be daunting to those not familiar with these skillsets. Inclusivity is one of our core values and is something we want to keep at the forefront of all future workshops. Looking ahead, we would like to expand our workshops to other easily accessible craft-based practices like zine-making, another medium often utilised in feminist activist artwork. In the future, we would like to bring in guest speakers and collaborative artists to expand and enrich the experience, broadening the dialogue.

Long term, one of our more ambitious goals is to collectively rent a permanent studio space where we would be able to host workshops on our own terms, giving us more freedom and control over the events. As well as this, however, we still want to maintain partnerships with local cafes and community venues and, eventually, hold events privately ourselves as well as in public venues. In the immediate future, however, our focus is on preparing for our first workshop event in Ropes & Twines in early June. Currently, we are finalising our branding and logo design, working on promotional posters and digital content, and accelerating our social media presence in order to raise awareness and push for more interest in our events. We have also been in conversations with Liverpool’s Independent Biennial, to see if they are able to sell the prints that are made in our workshops, during the festival. In Evaluating Community Arts and Wellbeing (2002), Clare Keating proposes a diagram outlining the core important elements to consider when assessing a community-based project; we are using this as a foundational framework to guide the development of our project as we progress to future upcoming workshops and events.