Our Aims & Objectives

The Aspen Culture aims to find creative ways of overcoming inequalities of women to access, engage with and contribute to the local culture, arts and heritage. We hold a core set of values and objectives:

• Giving women from migrant, refugee, asylum-seeking and host community background the opportunity to access and contribute to local culture in an easy and accessible way;
• Promoting social cohesion and integration between women from different backgrounds in the region - creating a collective identity as women regardless of their origins with the opportunity to celebrate and share aspects from their own subjective cultural background;
• Providing positive and confidence-building experiences for women from marginalised positions in society in which they can develop their skills;
• To facilitate the established community, new emerging communities and local organisations working in the arts, heritage and cultural sector the process of understanding cultural diversity in the region and promoting cultural diversity and exchange;
• Offering participatory workshops around creative methods of self-expression in which women are given the right to be represented and importantly, represent themselves;
• Creating opportunities for self-development for volunteers and participants involved in the project
• Promoting women's subjective artistic outputs, giving those involved in the project the opportunity to have a voice within North East culture.
• Exploring and redefining the nature of the concept of Britishness investigating how the regionís rich and diverse society has changed for the better from embracing cultural hybridity;
• Considering how the citizenship agenda can assist in the process of creating a sense of belonging and openness about women's identity and also create a sense of commonality between women from diverse origins.

Furthermore Aspen FORWARD has a set of specific aims:

• To develop projects within community organisations to raise awareness among practising communities about UK law and the health and psychological risks of FGM.
• To increase the confidence of women, men and young people within practising communities to reject this procedure as part of their identity.
• To increase the skills and capacity of community organisations and young people.
• To improve coordination of activities amongst voluntary and community groups and statutory agencies working on this issue including capacity building of partners and delivery organisations.

By addressing some of the aims and objectives listed above, the Aspen Culture project hopes to really challenge any cultural inequalities that women from diverse backgrounds may face in the region when accessing culture. By promoting awareness of the advantages that sharing culture can bring, the project can start to address issues around cultural inequality in the North East and further afield.