With our “Project4Equality Community Exhibition” we want to create a space for expression around the topic of feminism while strengthening the feeling of feminist community. The event will include feminist artworks, spoken word performances, and workshops and cover topics such as gender-based violence, empowerment, femininity and much more. This will be a safe space therefore no hate in any form will be tolerated. The event will take place from 2PM-9PM, so everyone is welcome to join and enjoy the exhibition, engage in conversation, and hang out together.
We are Project4Equality, a feminist group based in the Hague. Our aim is to create a space for feminist activism, where we support each other in planning and executing ideas and projects that share the purpose of equality and fighting sexism. We understand this community as an intersectional feminist movement. People experience different barriers depending on the facettes of their identity. Gender, race, sexual orientation, class, religion, and physical ability affect the way a person experiences oppression and discrimination. We see the depth and impact of inequalities and the relationships between them in any given context. Considering these premises, we aim to make feminism accessible to everyone, moving beyond the big-scale protests and creating a feminism that we can apply in our daily lives, changing our behaviours and attitudes, smashing the patriarchy from the roots.
After our discussion on the topic of night safety, where we discovered that spiking poses a big issue in the hague, we contacted PIP to work on the safety of women in the club (this includes spiking, sexual harassment, etc). We presented a proposal and are now actively working to make changes to improve women’s saftey in the club. So far the men’s urinals have been moved and covered by a fence, to create a less male dominated environment in the common area of the club. Additionally, there is one toilet that is now only available for women, here, posters are showing what you can do if you have been harassed or felt uncomfortable in any way. The staff has had trainings on gender issues within night life, by the organisation ‘Sexmatters’. This is to ensure that if a woman reaches out for help, all staff members know how to handle the situration in the most efficient and respectful way possible. Nevertheless, there are still changes to be made, which is why we are still actively asking for PIP’s cooperation. We have also partaken in the ‘PowerPitch’, an event sponsored by PIP and the grey space in the middle, where young creatives can pitch a project idea to get financial support. We have written a proposal, where we talked about our cooperation with PIP and the project of a “feminist rave”. We have gotten 1000€ funding for the event and are therefore now trying to organise this event.
We are excited to announce that we started working with Red Dot Foundation on the SafeCity project. Red Dot Foundation Group is a US-based organization that works at the intersection of gender, technology, data and urban planning. @safecityapp is its flagship program: a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at the local level. Their idea: providing first-hand data to individuals, local communities and local administrations with the purpose of identifying factors and causes that lead to violence in public spaces. Active since 2012, SafeCity collected over 23000 reports from all over India, Kenya, Nepal and other countries. SafceCity and Project4Equality have the same mission: addressing gender issues at the local level through awareness raising and data collection in order to find the right strategies and take action to make cities safer, encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone, especially for womxn.