Rotherham families share hopes and dreams with YWCA Yorkshire

Last weekend YWCA Yorkshire attended the WOW Rotherham Festival 2025, hosting a day-long workshop and performing the poem ‘Sunflowers’ on the main stage. 

The charity team spent the day talking to women and children about their experiences living in Rotherham. Through conversation, play, writing and crafts, families shared their stories and were encouraged to think big about what they wished for their future selves. 

YWCA Yorkshire support women, children and families to create better futures in Rotherham through a housing and wrap-around-support Project called Fleming Gardens. The Fleming Gardens Team deliver specialist housing and trauma-informed services to 47 vulnerable families in the town.  The charity works in partnership with organisations like Voluntary Action Rotherham, Flux Rotherham and Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council to build happy and healthy communities, and so jumped at the opportunity to get involved in WOW Rotherham Festival when asked. 

YWCA Yorkshire Volunteer Coordinator, Nicole Cannon, explains why events like WOW Rotherham Festival are so important for communities and how YWCA Yorkshire are encouraging families to share their stories. Nicole said: “The people that come to YWCA Yorkshire often don’t have the advantages of family support, secure housing or financial stability. This makes everything they do more difficult. From getting a tenancy, to getting an education, to work experience, to parenting. Even accessing health services can be more challenging without the right support network.  

“As a charity, we deliver inclusive, compassionate and expert services and we connect people in with other support across the region. We also listen to people, advocate for them and support them to advocate for themselves. We listen to their story. We encourage them to share, and we support them to dare to dream about what ‘good’ might look like in the future, so that they can create that future for themselves and their children.  

“We’ve recently been working on the YWCA Listening Project, which has given women a platform to share their stories through poetry. The WOW Rotherham Festival workshop was an extension of this project which we launch on International Women's Day this year. At WOW Rotherham, we encouraged families to share their stories with us and hang their hopes and dreams for the future on our Wishing Tree.” 

A continuation of the YWCA Listening Project, the WOW Rotherham festival workshop was designed to support families to share their stories and capture their ambitions for the future. People’s wishes for themselves ranged from wanting their favourite football team to ‘win the league’, to be part of ‘stopping climate change’, or for ‘an end to war’. People shared how they hoped their ‘family could be happier’ in the future and how they wished that their ‘nanna was at peace now she had passed away’. As well as contributing to the wishing tree, children were encouraged to craft and draw sunflowers and were gifted their own sunflower seeds to take home and grow. Families were also given information about services and support near them. 

To learn more about partnering with YWCA Yorkshire on community activities, festivals and workshops, contact admin@ywcayorkshire.org.uk