Kolkata Sanved and Living Lens Collaboration

Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Sohini Chakraborty, founder of Sanved. We met Sohini in India in November 2009 on a trip we were lucky enough to be awarded through UnLtd & Journeys For Change and Rose and Sohini have been finding ways of collaborating ever since. Sohini uses dance therapy movement with survivors of trafficking. Our methodologies are similar and it seemed clear that they could work very powerfully together. Our collaborative project is now officially launched and our aim is to use the Olympics as an opportunity to raise awareness of sex trafficking, while the eyes of the world are on the UK. Evidence suggests that there has been an increase in the trafficking of women into the UK in order to ‘service’ the construction workers building the Olympic village. Police and NGOs say that this will continue with the arrival of tourists for the Games themselves, and then once the games are over, there is the question of what will happen to these women. We will be working with survivors of trafficking to produce a dance and video performance, which will be performed at venues around London.

You can support this project by visiting the page we have created on Buzzbnk. Here you can register your support and receive updates on the progress of the project and you can make a donation towards the project. We are looking to raise £5,000 over the next 2 months to pay for equipment and to cover essential international travel to promote the project. Please click on the Buzzbnk link and register your support and send the link to your networks so we can ensure that the voice of victims of trafficking are heard during this high profile sporting event.

Next Steps 2011

The Next Steps project is now in it's second year. As I mentioned in the last Next Steps blog, we have created a social media network for all partners with the help of Nathalie from On Road Media. The purpose of the site is to exchange ideas, information and expertise about the Next Steps project and about the wider field of human trafficking prevention. The partners decided that the site needs to be closed and so it isn't accessible to the public. If you work in this field and feel the network may contribute to your work click here to apply.

Rose and Keren (one of our senior facilitators) have been carrying out workshops to produce footage for the DVD. These are Rose's thoughts on their progress so far:

"Knowing that our strength lies in drawing out personal experience, we were clear that we weren’t going to produce an informative DVD, explaining every step of the witness process – with all the variables witnesses face this would have ended up being a very complex DVD! Instead we honed in on two key themes that seemed to be relevant to any woman standing as a witness, whatever her previous and on-going experience – the first is managing expections and the second is looking after yourself.

We shot the footage with a group of project partners from UKBA, UKHTC/SOCA, SCD9, the Poppy Project and CPS. Our challenge was how to generate images to go with their excellent interviews. We had fun thinking of creative ways of doing this, and engaging the partners in unexpected activities – sometimes ending in total hilarity – not what we were expecting from such a professional group!

We also worked with a group of women from the Poppy Project, some of whom shared their stories, while others took part in video workshops to generate images to accompany the stories. And through Sue at Soca we were also able to interview a woman who had relevant experience."

Over the next 6 months we will be editing the footage and getting approval from partners on the content and design of the D VD.

Happy New year!

Albeit one month in. I am just back from maternity leave and cranking up for 2011. Rose has been busy busy busy along with Keren working on the Next Steps project (see blog earlier) and the Islington Hubs project. We will blog on their progress in the next few days. It's been exciting having another baby and taking 6 months to be at home with the wee boy - but it's also a delight to be back and a part of the passion and challenges that Living Lens is. I intend to blog more regularly as a form of communication, but also exploration. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like me to blog on about!
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Kolkata Sanved Collaboration
We're delighted to announce that our collaboration with Kolkata Sanved is still in development. Our vision is to work together, using video and dance, drawing together our experience and learning from each others' skills.

The latest news on this project is that Saddlers Wells hope to fund Sohini (founder of Kolkata Sanved) to come over in March. We'd like to build some shared work into her time here and are looking for ways of making that possible.

We're also keen to make Sohini's time in London as fruitful as possible, so if you're interested in meeting with her or working with her during this period, please get in touch.

Stand With Us Update
At the beginning of the year we were working with child domestic workers in India, Togo and Peru. They made a video for the International Labour Organisation who are developing a new convention on domestic work - but haven't included anything about young domestic workers.
Fiamma, Eyelyn, Komi, Foulera and Sajatha have been at the International Labour Convention in Geneva - find out how they got on and watch their video