Cardboard Citizens are a professional theatre company working to educate, inspire, empower and upskill homeless and at-risk people through theatre and the arts, while also engaging general audiences and raising public awareness of homeless issues.
Women make up 26 per cent of homeless service clients and are likely to have greater levels of mental illness due to physical & sexual abuse (Crisis, 2016), causing body shaming thoughts (NEDA, 2015), low self-esteem and self-worth. Services working with this group ‘should incorporate features such as women-only spaces and peer support’ (St Mungos, 2014).
Cardboard Citizens are aiming to set up a specialist women-only project to reach out and help support homeless and vulnerable women. Through this project, they aim to develop work with and for vulnerable women, to encourage, empower and support them to move on to more positive futures. This includes women who are currently classed as homeless, those who are at risk and have children in their care, and/or those that have fled domestic violence or abuse.
Through a series of outreach workshops across London, followed by a week-long intensive Residency, they will engage up to 50 women, with at least 10 achieving a PEARL employability qualification. At the end of the week-long Residency, the participants will have explored issues relevant to their lives, and have developed a new short piece of theatre that raises awareness of these issues.
Cardboard Citizens have applied to The Big Give campaign (https://www.thebiggive.org.uk/) which runs as an online campaign for a week in December. In case you haven’t heard about the Big Give, it is an online giving campaign where each donation during the live campaign week is matched like for like. The opportunity to have your donation matched is obviously very popular among donors and really encourages people to be generous.
In order for them to take part in the campaign we need to secure £1,000 – £3,000 in pledged support by 1 September (minimum of £100 per pledger). This is where you come in!
If they are successful in gaining funding from the Big Give’s funding pot (up to £3k) and manage to secure £3k in their own pledges before 1 September, they have the possibility of raising up to £12,000 through this campaign for this important project.
They would be delighted if you were able to pledge your support towards this campaign, whether individually or through your organisation. Please contact [email protected] for further information.
