Make Space for Girls is a charity which campaigns for better parks and public spaces for teenage girls. At present, almost all the facilities which councils and others provide ‘for teenagers’ are dominated by boys and we are working to change this inequality and designs teenage girls out of public space.
The charity was founded in March 2021, and has already created significant impact in a relatively short space of time, and we are now looking to build on this success by strengthening our governance and recruiting our first members of staff. We also want to set up a Youth Panel so that teenage girls can shape the future direction of the charity themselves.
Make Space for Girls works in a number of different ways to meet its objectives.
Firstly, we campaign to raise awareness of the issue - most of the discrimination is not deliberate and when people understand the issue they want to change it. So social media, sharing good practice and giving presentations to councils, architects and developers are a core part of our work.
Also crucial is that we engage with teenage girls to find out what's wrong with parks and public spaces and what would work for them. We partner with other organisations to do this - for example Natural England or the LSE - and share our findings and good practice so that it can be replicated elsewhere. After being involved in the co-design of two small parks, we're particularly keen to work on projects which result in new facilities for girls and young women.
Wider research is also important on a range of topics, for example, to discover how current facilities are used, or what the health impact of the current inequality is on teenage girls; we partner with universities but also originate our own work, for example the Parkwatch report, which produced the first statistics on who is actually using teenage facilities in parks (the results demonstrated that 90% of the provision was 90% used by boys and young men).
We also advocate for policy change, to prevent the inequality being reproduced by guidance and law. To do this we work with professional bodies and government committees, as well as providing input to councils and bodies such as Sport England.
