 Hello, good afternoon. As I said, my name is Josephine and for the past two and a half years I worked at the University of Birmingham, the Cat Bear Research Library and together with Yasmin I worked on a recent project that aimed to open up the University of Birmingham special collections department to non-academic audiences as well as achieving wider well-being and social impact goals. So in our presentation we want to talk a little bit about the background of the manuscript collection that inspired the project. It's part of a wider research and engagement project and I also want to give Yasmin a chance to introduce you to go Women Alliance, our community-based partner. We will then talk you through the different kind of workshops and steps we took on the project and we'll finish off by reflecting on the project outcomes and the lessons learned. So the project really focused on or was inspired by the Mingana collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts. It's one of the University of Birmingham's most significant cultural assets. It brings together over 3,000 manuscripts encompassing mainly Christian, Islamic and Jewish texts. There are written over 20 languages including Arabic, Syriac, Persian and date from the 7th century to the early 20th century and among the most notable manuscripts is a 7th century Hijazi Qur'an which is thought to have been one of the oldest written copies of the holy Muslim text as well as the example you see on the screen are sayings attributed to Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. The Mingana collection itself has been designated as a collection of national international importance since 2007 but as part of the history really the collection is named after Alphonse Mingana who acquired the bulk of the collection on free journeys to the Middle East in the 1920s. The collecting trips and the acquisitions were funded by Edward Cadbury from the famous chocolate making family and Quaker philanthropist and his vision was really to build a world-class library of theological manuscripts in Birmingham and both of these gentlemen were really pioneers in their attempts to understand and make accessible the diverse languages and religions and cultures of the Middle East especially in this day and age a really important cause. And really this background of how the collection came to Birmingham was the inspiration for a wider project because we have a Quaker funding eastern theologian Alphonse Mingana who was born in the Ottoman Empire to go out and collect Muslim manuscripts in the 1920s. I mean how crazy is that? You would have a difficult term to argue in today. And then also the context about Birmingham today, one of the youngest cities in Europe and really Birmingham was shaped by faith diversity and the religious pluralism in the city was the driving force for the city's economic prosperity from the 18th century onwards. And the university on the other hand was founded in 1900 as England's first civic university and allowed students from all backgrounds and religions to be accepted on an equal basis. Today it's a super diverse city with an unprecedented variety of cultures, identities, faiths and languages. Yet local, national, international events have created increased tensions and feelings of insecurity, suspicion and anxiety. And such attitudes and perceptions are really a major threat to the future success of Birmingham and all its citizens, businesses and communities. So really what the university wanted to do is to bring together people from different cultural and religious backgrounds to create an environment that reflects the diversity of Birmingham and provides opportunities for everyone to excel. And we used the Mingana collection on this project called Spreading the World, which was generously funded by the Esmeralda Fairburn Collections Fund. And the idea was to use this manuscript collection to connect local people with their culture and religious heritage and also encourage pride and confidence in Birmingham's identity as a city shaped by faith diversity. And this was really based on the belief that the collection could not serve only as a source for research and teaching but also opportunities for discovery and enjoyment. And the idea was to bring together the manuscripts with people to instigate new conversations and new dialogues. And we tested and developed a number of new opportunities for learning and participatory activities, one of which was the project I worked on with Yasmin. So we could explain this very complicated relationship. I've written what Go Women Alliance is about on the slide and there's lots of text there, but I thought it'd be best if I explained how this partnership formed. About three years ago, although Go Women Alliance predominantly works with women in terms of developing language and enterprise, because we worked a lot predominantly with women and particularly with first generation immigrants. We came up with the programme and we got funding from Heritage Lottery to develop an oral histories programme capturing experiences of women, first generation immigrants coming particularly from South Asia. And we worked very closely with the Birmingham Archives to look at the gaps and so that we can develop very high quality content to archive for future generations to come. As part of that particular project, we got an opportunity to turn the oral history project into an exhibition at the Birmingham Museums Arts Gallery in the Community Gallery. We obviously were very delighted but never worked in that particular sector, so we worked very closely with the museum to develop that particular exhibition. Whilst working on that particular exhibition, we started developing a lot of collaborations and hence we met Josephine and colleagues who were working at that time on something called Gollum Exhibition. We got talking and Josephine and her colleague would want you to come and do some workshops with some of our ladies because obviously with the Arabic background. We did some work in collaboration with Josephine and colleagues and again some of the work got displayed as part of the Gollum Exhibition, hence opening new opportunities for the community that we were working in. We kept our collaboration going. Josephine moved on to another role but we got in touch again and with this particular exhibition and the work that Josephine was doing, she wanted to come back and work with some of our ladies to deliver fantastic workshops, trying to create them into different activities. Now to explain, as Josephine already explained in terms of Birmingham, the area that we predominantly work in has a very high ethnic minority make-up. Predominantly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. We work predominantly with women and one of the biggest barriers that we have in engagement with them is normally, not themselves but normally their families, barriers that we came across when we were doing the Home Away from Home programme which was the Heritage Lottery Funding Project. But as we started engaging with the museum and collaborated with various partners, our ladies became very interested in the creative side and wanted to get involved. When Josephine approached us, we spoke to some of our groups, Dosti group, Dosti meaning friendship. It's a group that we set up mainly for what I call the seniors. I don't like to call them the older ladies, they get offended by that. The seniors in our community, basically to get them to come and as a social thing, meet up, discuss things, develop new skills. And also a parents forum at a centre that we predominantly work with is a children's centre that we actually work through. And with those two groups, we actually developed a subgroup of ladies who wanted to get involved in these particular workshops. So over the next six weeks, Josephine and colleagues and Josephine invited a number of experts in the area and you will see the photographs later to come and deliver these workshops. Now as part of that, our ladies had ended up producing some fantastic book binding diaries that got involved with actually from very beginning to do marbling all the way up to book binding. Again, for us as an organisation, this was a totally new experience. And we were very surprised as we moved along the programme how much they engage and how much they've enjoyed. And towards the end, I will explain about some of the legacies and some of the outcomes of this particular project. But that's how our relation developed with the museum and opened a lot of new doors for our sort of learners and our users of our services as well. Yeah, so to just chip in like a lot of other professionals in the room, I have moved around different institutions in the West Midlands and I will keep going to continue the good working relationships I developed. So yeah, I was a Birmingham Museum, then I was at the University of Birmingham and now I'm at the Black Country Living Museum. Okay, so the creative engagement project, as Yasmin said, focused on working with women in one of Birmingham's most deprived areas. And the idea was to explore different manuscript making techniques, give the ladies the chance to express themselves through creativity and develop self-confidence and vocational skills. These were kind of the out intended outcomes we set at the beginning. And the idea was to deliver about five sessions. And we hoped for kind of 10 participants or so who would kind of follow us through the project. And hopefully at the end have a creative artwork that was inspired by the collection. I won't spoil the ending, but we have been blown away by these, we got the outcomes and more. Okay, let's see what we did. The first session was bringing the ladies to the archives on the university campus and have a handling session. And like I think a lot of people in the room will know is you put people in front of original manuscripts and allow them to handle them. And it's just the magic happens. So they examined the original manuscript binding to kind of get ideas. I got them to take detailed photos for them that we kind of looked at throughout the process. They got to speak to my colleagues. On the photo is my colleague Marie, our paper conservator. So they're really intrigued to kind of learn about how we're looking after the documents. So it was a really kind of good kickoff session to start the project. We then started investigating four different kind of techniques that are involved in making manuscripts and making book bindings. And one of them is making recycled paper. So I made my own DIY mold and decal and used the kitchen blender to get some recycled paper. And we had varying results with it. For some strange reason, when I tested it at home, everything worked. And of course, when I taught it to the group, somehow we couldn't get the mold off the paper. Then we looked into paper marbling because a lot of the manuscript bindings had either the cover where was covered with marbled paper or the inside of them. It was a very popular kind of technique used for book binding in the Middle East. So we looked at marbling and kind of dotting the paper and then dotting the color on the thickened water and then taking it off. And you can see how proud, like surprising it is always to kind of then lift the paper up and see what you kind of produced. We then were lucky enough to work with an artist, Shaheen Khazmani, who's the lady in the turquoise hijab in the middle. She studied at the Prince of School of Traditional Arts in London and has a background in Islamic geometric design. So thanks to her, we got two sessions where we taught the ladies about how the geometric design is based. They got to work with the compass. And that was actually the only point where I noticed it's noticeable difference between the Dosti Group and the Parents Forum because most ladies in the Dosti Group hadn't gone through a formal education in the UK. So they were very insecure with using the compass where a lot of the ladies in the Parents Forum had been to school in England in the area and were more comfortable in kind of experimenting with that. And then finally, we brought it all together to produce our very own book binding and notebook. And again, I worked with a local book binder, Eloise Lee, who over two sessions we kind of first started with making the covers. And then we used a basic optic stitch technique to sew them the pages together. And you can see a bit like we used the marbled paper and we used the kind of geometric design we did in the beginning to bind it together. Towards the end of the project, I mean, where shall I start? So before, before Yasmin and I met, I think, and we discussed the project, we were kind of thinking, oh, well, if we have five or six ladies who kind of come constantly every week, I'm happy. And I know I've made a difference. I think I was blown away because they kept all almost every despite all the children sick or anything in the family that kept coming back. And it was, we had constantly about 12, 15, even 18, 20 ladies coming to these sessions. So it was almost triple the number we kind of had expected initially. And I knew that I was accepted by the group when they started feeding me. It's part, I mean, it's part of the hospitality thing. But I think in in kind of British Asian cultures, but it's like, I think session three, two or three, they started bringing in like rice dishes and lovely things. And I just felt like, yeah, it's going well. And then towards the end, suddenly people start to ask me, Oh, will we will we get a certificate? And I said, Yes, you can have a certificate. That's something I hadn't thought of. But basically, it was really like working with the group and in the moment that we kind of looked at, well, they really want certificates. So I designed them inspired by the little geometric designs we did. We did less just some heavy paper and I printed them off and put their names on. But they were so immensely proud to take these certificates back home with their finished products. You can see the books we did here on the table. And we had a little kind of ceremony at the end where we kind of handed out the certificates. And we had some lovely food. And it was just kind of seeing them walking out of the rooms with their finished product, going a couple of houses up the street, and then showing it to their family. It was for me the the moment where I realized, yes, it had such an important impact to them. Right, quickly moving along, we had amazing feedback from individuals from very simple things like, I, you know, I can do a lot more work with my children to I'm more determined to learn other activities. So something that started off as a very creative thing for us to engage what's already been described as hard to reach. And that's the group that we actually work with. It gave them a new opportunity to explore new creativity, something that they were good at, something that they can actually then inspire their young children to take forward. So overall, I think we saw, so we had, we have an external evaluator for the for the project. And she did some kind of evaluating, but it hasn't been finished. So we don't can't show you yet lovely graphs or anything. But really, the outcomes were really that we had an increased confidence in for the ladies to participate in the arts in the in the in the widest sense. They showed a continued enthusiasm for the different workshops and were re and they were really proud to share their work with family and friends, which was really key, I think, for them. And over the two or two and a half three years, we work together. It's something you can't show in one individual project. But now we have worked for a number of years on different kind of things together. It's in the beginning, they were really scared to walk through the museum door and just go in. And then I think last Christmas, you told me that when they went to the Christmas, German Christmas Market in Birmingham, they actually asked, Yeah, can we go in? We want to go in. And they went from themselves. So it's kind of we always talk about this abstract way of breaking down barrier and encouraging them. And often it's not easily done in a six or 10 week project. But kind of, we've seen the kind of impact over over the years. And we hopefully also have some important legacy of the project left. I was going to say, I will end with what our key speaker today said, which really resonated with me, true reflection of how good a project's been. It's about the sustainability and in terms of partnerships that you form. And in terms of long term sustainability and impact of this work that we've been doing, Josephine is what the women are continuing to do. They're now creating their own cards, knitting scarves, I've actually got a herb garden going. And they're now actually raising money themselves to be able to continue the program and the project to continue. And we will obviously carry on working with Josephine, carry on doing creative workshops with them. And that is the true impact for projects such as these. Okay, thank you very much.