‘Who knows my name?’
An inspirational poem written by Jeredyne , our Founder
We are winners! We are different!
Thanks to our Rivers community of women for continuing to make a difference in Crawley!
Read more about our award..
Jeredyne has allowed a small community of local women to utilise their academic, professional or interpersonal skills to help support isolated and vulnerable women within their local area in making positive changes in their lives.
She is instrumental in championing women only spaces, including learning classes across local community centres, coffee mornings drop-in groups, women hosting and participating in national awareness campaigns such as IWD, Parliament Week.
She is the lead facilitator for the successful delivery of these programmes. With Rivers she has set out to empower women through mentoring, delegating and supporting them to take ownership of these projects.
Jeredyne is currently championing a campaign to get the community talking about poor mental health and to raise awareness of these issues among women from Black and Asian backgrounds.
Read more about our campaign..
Nüshu – the language of women
Nüshu is considered to be the world’s only writing system that is created and used exclusively by women.
For about 1000 years in a region of the Hunan province, China, nüshu (“women’s writing”) has been used exclusively by women to communicate their deeper feelings to other women. It is thought that it was invented by the concubine who belonged to an emperor of the Song dynasty (960-1279).
Study of the scripts did not begin until 1950 but soon after had to be abandoned due to the Chinese Cultural revolution. When research began again in 1980, only about a dozen women could read nüshu and only three could write it. All nüshu material, including letters and wedding congratulations, is written in verse. Men played no role in the production or dissemination of its writings and it was often used to write stories that challenged the conventional male morality.
Record-Breaking Crochet Blanket – Mother India’s Crochet Queens:
The lady behind this mammoth project was 44-year-old crochet-lover Subashri Natarajan from Chennai, India, who told us: “I started the wonderful art of crochet from a young age. At the age of 10, I remembered very clearly playing with yarn creating beautiful dreams with crochet. I have been a very ambitious child always wanting to achieve great things in life. This dream of making it big in the world stayed with me into adulthood.
Over 1,000 participants aged eight to 85, from India, as well as 13 other countries, contributed by creating hundreds of 40 x 40 in sections to make one enormous blanket, measuring an astonishing 11,148.5 m² (120,001 ft² 72 in²) – easily covering the football pitch on which it was laid.
Since breaking this record, the Crochet Queens have gone on to make a record-breaking longest crochet scarf (14.089-km) and the largest display of crochet sculptures (58,917).
These records have been broken since but who knows, they may do it again!