By Cordelia Sampson & Dr Eve Hepburn

Illustration by Ida Henrich

As 2018 draws to a close, we’re really excited to share a report with you about how much Fearless Femme has helped our volunteer contributors and readers to manage their mental health challenges, and the wider impact we’ve had through collaborations and policy research.

During the last year at Fearless Femme, we’ve tested an approach to mental wellbeing that focuses on preventative and creative interventions, designed to build self-confidence, resilience and community. We wanted to tackle the stigma and isolation that often accompanies mental ill-health, and instead build warmth, openness and honesty in its place. We’ve also sought to shine a light on the causes of mental ill-health amongst young women and non-binary people, and to tackle these through our recommendations for policy change.

To conduct our impact report, we carried out three surveys, looked at social media analytics and collated feedback you’ve sent us via email, Twitter, Facebook and our website. And we have been THRILLED to discover that our approach is working, where a majority of you told us that engaging with our community has had a positive impact on your mental wellbeing.

Of course, thank you so much to all the lovely, generous and kind-hearted people who have supported Fearless Femme this pilot year. You have all had a positive impact on us too! Your contributions are INVALUABLE to us and we could never begin to measure them.

Receiving your feedback has meant the world to our whole team this year! Every time someone sends us a message or comments on an article it brightens up our day. We’ve included a few highlights here…

Our Volunteer Writers & Artists

In the last year, over 230 of you have sent us creative artwork, prose and poetry about your mental health experiences, at an average rate of 1.7 submissions per day! And you’ve told us that being part of our community has boosted your confidence, self-worth and employability. 97% of our volunteers told us they struggle with their mental health and 90% said contributing to Fearless Femme has had a positive impact on their mental health.

We love receiving feedback from our volunteers and wanted to share a couple of excerpts here:

“It was a big step for me to share my work with Fearless Femme, as I prefer to hide my mental health issues (due to experiences of stigma and being misunderstood). So, it took a lot of confidence and courage for me to do so, but contributing my poem to Fearless Femme, then sharing that with others felt like a positive way to communicate with people about my mental health, because the focus was on my creativity and my ability to write, rather than what’s “wrong” with me.”

“For me the writing process is therapeutic, it’s a way of getting stuff out of my head and imposing some sort of order on it. And writing with an audience in mind, makes me search harder for the potential positive outcome, or the lesson to be learned… I also like feeling like part of the Fearless Femme community, of strong and feisty women, who have experience of, but are not defined by mental health issues. It lessens the feelings of isolation!”

Our readers

We were amazed to find that our online magazine has been read by over 19,000 people in 129 countries around the world in just ten months.We certainly didn’t expect this level of global impact so early in the project. But this shows how much the content we’re creating together resonates with people. We’ve also gained over 5,000 social media followers and over 200 newsletter subscribers. 95% of our readers said they struggle with their mental health, but 83% said reading Fearless Femme helped them to feel better, and often, less alone.

“I just read your online magazine and it is ALL kinds of awesome!!  It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before and I now feel totally energised after reading it – like I’ve just put on some wonder woman pants and I’m ready to face the world!”

“I felt so much reading this. There is so much I recognise and can relate to. Reading this helps. Thanks” – Reader Response to the article Choose Happy, Choose You

Others

We have also collaborated with more than 50 organisations, including the University of Edinburgh (our main project partners), Girlguiding Scotland, Women of the World, and the Society of Young Publishers. We even received the support of Nicola Sturgeon MSP, the First Minister of Scotland, who wrote an article for our Next Step issue, as well as several celebrities who have endorsed our creative approach to mental health. We’re really excited that leading organisations in the UK are recognising the importance of our, and indeed, your work.

What Next?

On the back of our extensive social impact across the globe, we have ambitious plans to scale up the creative community we have nurtured, and help even more people dealing with mental health issues. And to do that, we need your help… So please keep sharing your creative work and feedback with us.We are here to help you, and we want you to keep steering us in our work. Together we will tackle the stigma of mental ill-health, fight structural inequalities that lead to ill-health, and continue  supporting the mental wellbeing of feminists of all genders into the future.

You can read our full Impact Evaluation Report below: