Celebrating & Embracing Equity

 The Last Post

International Women's Day

It's ten year this March since this blog was created to share stories for women empowerment. After ten years it is a time to reflect and even consider this post being the last post, since the posts are becoming few and far in between. The Last Post (November 2022) coincidentally mentioned The Last Post on sharing my Flying for Britain short educational film launch, where The Last Post was played as The Standard was raised. Blogging is a great way to disseminate information on stories, projects created and collaborating with, so it's not easy to quit this blog sphere when there's always something more to share. 

Spring Blossoms

Break the bias through stories

International Women's Day 

March is the month for Ms Rose Blossom, it's the month of International Women's Day/Women's History Month and when this blog began, nine years ago. I've had remarkable opportunities to empower girls and young women ( boys also included) at primary, secondary schools and library centres as a storyteller and author, encouraging them to aspire higher and believe they can fly from World Book Day/Week to the month end. Sharing my own journey and other stories of fly girls/ pioneer women it was delightful to see how much of a positive impact a good story can make. I was also fortunate to be recruited on to the BBC 100 years of storytelling tour around the UK, with the aim to encourage the next generation into storytelling careers.

How awards can help writers growth

Queen's Honours Awards

Reflecting on June's journey in my work of girls and women empowerment I humbly received the honour of a BEM award from the Queen's Honour birthday list, this prompted me to do a blog post to share the importance of accepting awards and why one should. Whilst working to support women and girls in the community is a vocation and not expectant of awards, there is also a joy of being celebrated and your work recognised. The Prime Minister officially acknowledges the panel's shortlisted candidates, after the government hands them over to the Queen who has the final approval. Why would one dismiss the awards under Order of the British Empire? Well, one reason Black Asian and Ethnic Minorities, BAME people do not accept these awards is because of the title being associated with empire? 

Why Race is a major component of failing school inclusion

 Women and Writers of Colour

Black Books - Non-Fiction

Last week my blog post was on inclusion failure as schools celebrated School Diversity Week, and this week gives further evidence on this matter. Not only are activists seeking to address the lack of black history in the school curriculum, but there are also findings that only 7% of women writers being studied at GCSE level English Literature, and a shocking 0.7% of writers of colour being included in the English Curriculum Key Stage 2- 4. The race equality think tank Runnymede Trust and Penguin Random House collaborated to investigate the lack of representation from ethnic minority authors and writers of colour. 

Why Inclusion is Failing?

 School Diversity Week

This week schools work on celebrating LGBT+ & Equality and Inclusion from 21st - 25th June. Last week I posted on Autism and Inclusion discussing why we need to celebrate our differences. But when the week is over, things return to normal, and only when the nation has campaigns do we remember to celebrate or create changes for excluded people. This is the same for Black History Month, a time when there is a possibility for black professionals to be invited into schools to give talks, and for our history to be shared in lessons. Things have improved recently with some schools taking time to collaborate with black-led organisations. The celebrations include the start of mandatory black history as The Black Curriculum since June 2020 campaigned for this to be actioned, and have trained over 3,300 teachers and 3,500 students reached to date. But why is inclusion failing?

Lessons for the Write Mind

Mental Health Awareness Week

Writing Webinar
led by Amanda Epe, Jo Robinson, and Anita Kelly

The past week with kindness as a theme for mental health awareness week, my colleagues and I began the week with free delivery of writing for wellbeing webinar, as a therapy to cope with the lockdown.

An intimate group of 13 participants joined the webinar to reflect and write about their resilience in overcoming struggles in the past, delivered by Mental Health Trainer Anita Kelly. Writing workshop facilitator Jo Robinson talked about lockdown learning, what have people learned about themselves, looking at the positives, and how they have been kind to themselves prompting the writing task.

Pros and Cons of Writing a Memoir

Best time to write

Fly Girls Wellness - Writing Coaching

During this lockdown period, many people find they can use their time for things they've always never found the time to do, such as more reading and writing. The Mirror compiled a list of the best travel adventure memoirs to read during the quarantine period and A Fly Girl Travel Tales book was fortunate named number 6 on this list, yay!

Reading other authors' memoirs can surely inspire the writer in you to tell your story and start writing. Whether it's a travel tale or another significant area to reflect on, it's a grand time to put pen to paper. Here are 6 Pros and one Con of writing a memoir:

How we celebrate IWD 2020

Each for Equal with Fly Girls

We are in our favourite period celebrating International Women's Day, Week, Month and looking forward to the year 2020 for the Fly Girls Wellness project.

On Sunday 8th, International Women's Day Fly Girls be active walk & run group met for Sunday celebrations after our regular run, to share stories and have a healthy drink, it was cheering to all who took part in the Vitality Big Half Marathon, and a special cheers to three of our first time half marathoners.

Our first-timers are still smiling since the 1st March, they say running uplifts you and we know that buzz you get afterward. However, our team are feeling on a high for their achievements, Jackie a very easy going gentle paced runner had recently started training for the event and had a smashing time of 2hrs and 34 mins, running most of the race and walking the last 3 miles.

National Storytelling Week

Celebrating Multicultural Stories

Amanda Epe at Rich Mix

The first of February marks National Storytelling Week, a great tool for building confidence and self-esteem. We are more familiar with storytelling as a vocal art, and then as the written art. Telling is to speak to the public, the receivers of the story being listeners, similarly, readers say of tales and literature "the story is telling us..." so we can agree that storytelling is telling stories through public speaking or writing.

The mission of storytellers are to spin a sequence of events from beginning to end with an underlying message, mission, and solution. We all love to tell narratives of our own, as "everyone has a story in them," alternatively sharing other people's stories and folktales are highly popular for storytellers. We cannot define storytelling in this correct way or that way, each culture has its own version of telling. Great vocal storytelling, however, uses other art forms to make the delivery more interesting and entertaining, such as gesture and movement, and writers "show and don't tell" with their words.

National Reading Day 2020

Book Chat and Book Recommendations

Happier by Tal Ben Shahar

At the start of the new year we set goals to do a number of things to improve ourselves in personal or professional development. One of the goals I've set over the years is to read more, did I set time aside? That's another question. A smart goal is to read a book a month especially if you are in a book club that have monthly meetings. So being in our book group it is mandatory to read at least one book a month. Within the Creative Writing Workshop and Book Group at SEIDs Hub, Wembley we discuss books that we've read and enjoyed and want to share it/them with others.

The Borough of Cultures 2020

All Rise

Join us for RISE- the opening event of Brent's year as London Borough of Culture on Saturday 18 January at Wembley Park. RISE will be a spectacular family-friendly outdoor show, with a local community cast of hundreds, telling the story of Brent through dance, theatre and projections, set to an incredible soundtrack, against the backdrop of Wembley Stadium. Brent is the home of Rachel Yankey, Riz Ahmed, Zadie Smith, the Grunwick strikers, legendary family businesses, famous Irish pubs, trailblazing young poets, Metroland Brent 2020, London Borough of Culture architects, great roads and the builders of the biggest Hindu Temple in Europe. Like Brent they did, and do, things in their own way.

Come rain or shine, ALL RISE!
Saturday 18 January 2020 Performance at 7pm Olympic Way, Wembley Park www.brent2020.co.uk/programmes/rise/

Climbing from 2019 to 2020

Time to recollect and envisage our growth

Fly Girls Wellness Pride of Brent/
Fly Girls UK Sundays at Wembley Stadium

We have climbed! Be it steep hills or mountains, in taking our baby steps and keeping moving we have gone from strength to strength in the Fly Girls Community and with our collaborative partner projects in 2019. We started the year on a walking mission up and down the hills of Harrow, starting from Wembley Park and taking a detour back to Wembley Park. Led by our walk leader Priti Khatri it was a cold Sunday morning on our first-morning meeting back for the year. The objective was to get some strength training in and enjoy the local surroundings especially for the members entering the Vitality Big Half Marathon.

End Violence Against Women Conference

16 Days of Activism

Amanda Epe speaker
Stop The Violence Conference NCC

Keeping the conversation going days after the 16 days of activism ending on Human Rights Day December 10th is vitally important in society to end the violence against women. Commencing on End the Violence toward women and girls day 25th November the conversations focus on women's safety against sexual and domestic violence globally. On a local level in a Newman School in West London, a panel of women spoke on issues to school girls at the annual Stop the Violence conference.

Pride of Brent Awards 2019

The Fly Girls Pride

Fly Girls Wellness being awarded
by Brent Council Leaders and Mayor of Brent
Leader Cllr Muhammed Butt, Mayor Cllr Ernest Ezeajughi
and far-right Chief Executive Carolyn Downs

A fortnight ago our community group celebrated being awarded the Pride of Brent at The Drum in a glitzy and glamorous event. The Fly Girls Wellness originally started as a running group in 2016 for beginner runners before catering for the needs of all its members and listening to the voices of the community by adding the walking element.