Girls Shift Digital: Reflecting on the Impact of Moving Online in Girls' Creative Youth Projects

Abstract

Over the past months, countless youth organisations and charities have adapted their services to support vulnerable young people who are unable to access face-to-face provision during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the organisations are also facing financial difficulties due to the crisis. What follows is an account of the processes and challenges of adapting specifically girl-centric creative-cultural programmes to the UK’s lockdown conditions. Using two organisations which we are both involved with as case studies, we explore the challenges and limitations of how the projects are shifting the delivery of their programmes online. Girl-Kind North East and the Young Women’s Film Academy are projects located in the North East of England, and provide girls with spaces to produce and showcase creative work. The projects differ in multiple ways (such as their foundational origins, organisational structure and funding), but both are underpinned by a feminist commitment to amplifying North East girls’ voices through creative production, and employing girl-made artefacts as tools for social action in their wider communities. There is also some overlap in the personnel and activities of the two organisations, which is significant in relation to our ensuing discussion

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