A winning woman helping women from Longsight!

At the last minute last week I was asked to stand in for someone and present one of the awards at Manchester International Women's Day Awards.  I'd been involved in organising the awards as Chair of the IWD Steering Group but we like to leave the award presenting to previous winners or women leading in their field. 

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the winner I was announcing was a woman who has been working to make a difference for women in Longsight. The winner was Nadia Ali who I presented with the “Women Shaping Their Community” Award at a ceremony held at the Manchester Town Hall. Honoured at the event were women who have made real contributions to Manchester life in fields such as science, art and sport.

Nadia was awarded the honour for her tireless community volunteer work. Years ago Nadia founded a very unique group – the Asian Single Parent Group. This group was formed after Nadia met many Asian single parents in the area, who were facing issues such as isolation, oppression, mental and physical abuse and lack of confidence and self esteem. The group provided a space for these parents to come together and share their feelings and anxieties. The parents involved became more confident, accessed training programmes, applied for paid employment opportunities and formed close friendships.

Nadia went on to successfully produce and present a radio show on ALL FM, named the Independent Woman Show. The show addressed the issues that single parents were facing, particularly those from South Asian communities. She effectively addressed these issues and campaigned for the rights of Asian Single parents.

Nadia has been a crisis worker for the St Mary Sexual Assault Centre and had a voluntary role with Manchester Rape Crisis. Over the past 17 years, Nadia has voluntarily supported over 75 women and has effectively signposted them to relevant service providers.

Nadia successfully completed the training to become a Parent Survival trainer and engaged many parents from Ardwick to participate in the course. Nadia was also instrumental in the initial development of Healthy Ardwick due to her effective partnership working abilities

Nadia is still very much involved in the local community and has recently set up a Zumba and Bollywood fitness class for local women as a way of addressing their health and wellbeing needs. 195 women are registered. This is an extension of the service that Manchester Dragon Tae Kwondo Club, which has provided a safe space for children for seven years.

Well done Nadia a very well deserved award. 

Why we still need International Women's Day

Last Friday, 8^th March was International Women’s Day. I am often challenged when talking about International Women’s Day about why we still need it. Here is an extract from my speech to the International Women’s Day Awards ceremony last week which highlights a few statistics from the Counting Women In Report, illustrating why we still need to celebrate women’s achievements and campaign for equality.

“It (Counting Women In Report) tells us just 22.5 percent of MPs and 17.4 percent of the Cabinet are women.  In Manchester Central we - for the 1^st time ever – last year, elected a labour woman member of parliament, Lucy Powell. But really Manchester what took us so long?

Women make up a mere 13.3 percent of elected mayors and 14.6 percent of Police and Crime Commissioners.

In the league table of the representation of women in politics, the UK has since 2001 fallen from 33^rd to 60^th place.

Tonight we are joined by some fantastic female journalists from the Manchester Evening News and the BBC – in their industry only 5 per cent of Editors of national daily newspapers are women.

When it comes to finance and the economy, a job which the men seem to be making a pretty big mess of at the moment, there are no women at all on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. Not one single woman. In 2013 how can that ever be deemed acceptable?

I wondered when reading this report what Emmeline Pankhurst would have made of all this. Over 90 years since her campaign for votes for women sometimes it feels like we have made hardly any progress at all.

We all know that there are consequences to this shocking lack of diversity in public life. It is weakening democracy and the public’s confidence in it.  By not ensuring that women are represented in decision-making we are wasting an enormous amount of talent. The huge economic challenges that we currently face will not and cannot be solved men alone.”