Emily Noble (She/Her), Student Opportunities Project Lead, Student Activities

Katie Fox (They/She), HR Officer (Learning & Development), People Team

Rori Raquib (She/Her), Director of Communications

Our Safe Spaces are a welcoming and inclusive space for members to come along and chat about certain subjects that affect all those who identify as women. In the past we have talked about menstrual cycles, harassment and the gender pay gap. We are always open to suggestions for topics. In these sessions we tend to use grounding exercises and meditation at the end to ensure that no one is leaving feeling stressed or upset by what has been discussed. 

Every other month we meet to discuss the Book Club choice which leaves plenty of time for all kinds of readers! We are always open to suggestions from anyone across the organisation as our Book Club is open to all Women’s collective members and ally’s so anyone can come along! In the past we have read Olive by Emma Gannon, His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie and most recently Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. We will next be meeting in November to discuss How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah E Hill, Nan McNamara, et al. so get yourself a copy and come along to share your thoughts! 

Our Arts and Crafts sessions are our most popular to members! We recently made Origami birds and penguins, and plan to make pompom earrings next! We are always open to volunteers who want to teach our members anything crafty so please do let us know if you’d like to run a session! 

These talks are a great way for our members to listen to and chat to empowering and inspiring women. For International Women’s Day we ran a Q&A about Women in Leadership whereby some of our female SLT members of staff talked about their career path and how they got into their roles. They also discussed challenges they had faced as women and answered some brilliant questions from our members. We have plans for more talks from other inspiring women coming up, we also usually offer free cakes and biscuits at our talks so don’t miss out on this! 

Our members' meetings offer a way for all members to meet with the co-leaders and SLT ally of the Women’s Collective to discuss how they think the Collective is doing and what else they would like to see from the network to improve. We tend to run these meetings in a hybrid style and share a padlet with different discussion pointers beforehand. So, if you are unable to attend the meeting you can still leave feedback on the padlet. Our network would be nothing without our members so we are always keen to hear ideas for improvements! 

The Fun bit! The whole point of our staff networks is for members to meet colleagues from other teams and our network socials are a great way to do this. These socials tend to be open to anyone in any network or even just staff who are interested in joining a network. We have taken a lunchtime trip down to Leeds Art Gallery, we've gone to Leeds Grand Theatre to watch Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World, and we are currently working with the other Staff Networks to plan a Winter Social.