2025: Creative consulting... and conversation clubs?

When I set up my consultancy back in 2012, and created my online portfolio last year, the CC stood for Creative Consultancy: a creative practice I could offer to socially-minded projects. This practice includes:

• Creative writing

• Literary editing

• Illustration

• Children’s book design and publication

• Teaching creative writing

• Participatory action research methods

• Mentorship

I also hoped that people might connect my work to the cc: button in email threads! Being cc:ed into brilliant conversations, and projects, over the past decade of my life has been a huge honour. I feel grateful to everyone who took a chance on creative approaches. These projects have allowed me to grow, learn, travel, research and practice creativity in the context of humanitarian and MHPSS interventions, which has been a privilege.

Speaking of which, this first quarter of 2025 I will:

• Continue to support our great My Hero is You team at WHO/UNICEF on our children’s book series, which seeks to help children and their carers cope with their mental health in emergencies. We are currently focusing on the mpox epidemic. Our script is right now being tested in DRC, CAR and Burundi for initial feedback.

• Create illustrations for a doctoral research project at Ulster University in Northern Ireland seeking to create “emotion cards” which resettled school children from refugee and migrant backgrounds can use to clarify and communicate their emotional experiences as newcomers. This marks a new form of qualitative research, whereby more traditional and sometimes intrusive practices of data collection, like surveying or interviewing, can be replaced with gentle visual stimuli.

• Provide mentorship to British author, Han Smith, who has been funded by the UK Arts Council's Developing Your Creative Practice Scheme to incorporate creative writing into her longstanding ESOL teaching skillset, potentially using some of Kitabna’s group story-writing methods. Han’s beautiful debut novel, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, came out in summer 2024, and remains one of my favourite lyrical reads of the past year. It was a powerful meditation on friendship, totalitarianism and courage in the face of oppression.

• Explore ways to further translate and share Kitabna's Toolkit for Story-writing, and distribute our beautiful book of Armenian children's stories, Tales from Armenia: finding our way following our amazing experience in Armenia in 2024.

A busy start to 2025, and yet I’m also engaging in a different kind of CC, right here in my native community of Somerset, in south-western England. I grew up in Somerset, and moved back to my roots after several years of working abroad, and postgraduate research in London, to live closer to nature and calm - something I find beneficial for my wellbeing.

CC here in Somerset stands for Conversation Club: a safe space for refugee and newcomer women coming together to learn English and form social connections in rural places. These are run by The Community Council for Somerset, another CC, and a charity that has existed since 1926. That was the same year my own great grandparents migrated to London from Mumbai, as Indian Parsi's: an ethno-religious group of Zoroastrians originally from Persia.

I have been volunteering at my local CC in Somerset for almost two years, supporting a local ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) tutor with her group of women from all over the world. I watched friendships, warmth and safety form between women from Bangladesh, Kurdistan, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. It was beautiful to see.

I discovered this group by chance, when I met a woman swimming in full hijab at our local pool. She told me she was Turkish, and had been living in Somerset for sixteen years, but could not speak much English. As I had worked in Turkey, with IOM, and had friends there, I practiced English with her sometimes in the pool. She eventually told me about the Conversation Club she attended, and I went along to visit. I never left! As I got to know the group, we even created a book together, about friends meeting in a new place and learning to swim locally. It was called Diving into English!

The power of these groups seems to me to be in the safe space it provides for vulnerable women to connect with each other, have social contact, practice English and make friends in their local community. Many women are isolated due to their caring commitments, lack of role in society, and loss of confidence due to low English levels in a predominantly English-speaking country. Our colleague spoke about the need for these spaces, brilliantly, in a recent interview for the BBC, at 01:13.

When an opportunity arose to start three new groups, in Chard, Yeovil and Frome this January 2025, I was delighted to accept the role of tutor as a part-time working commitment. Since starting last week, I have met so many great people working at Fair Frome, the Boden Centre in Chard and Yeovil Arts Space. My participants have so far come from all over the world, to these small towns. We have women attending from Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, and more hope to join from Portugal and Poland. Before they came to the UK, these women worked as doctors, teachers, students and had dreams beyond living in a safe and peaceful place. I hope we can support them with these dreams, beyond learning English. Most importantly, I hope we can build up their confidence to talk to people in our neighbourhoods, and connect, so everyone can feel seen and heard in our community.

One of my favourite conversations was exchanging stories about Syria in our Yeovil group, and my time there: first in Damascus before the war in 2009, and secondly, working for Kitabna with refugees in the north-eastern Kurdish region of Rojava in 2019. Now that the regime has changed in Syria, some of the women expressed their hopes to return home to visit, this summer, fourteen years later: a holiday they never believed they would be able to take.

As important as it is - and my great honour, too - to work on international interventions, and share my creative skillset, I am thrilled to be supporting my local community in this way. It makes home feel like home: a safe and inviting place.

It is also a testament to the lessons we learnt in November, with WHO in Romania, about what we need to do to really listen to our communities.