The ‘I come from’ project, one of the strands within the ‘Imagine’ project, set out to work with a group of Rotherham's young women, defined as Roma by their school and the communities around them. The project aimed to explore their experiences and visions of an imagined future and their fused identities and shared sense of belonging, all of which would be interpreted and presented through images, textiles, song and poems.

As individual stories came together, shared traditions and connections across cultures began to emerge. Fragments of stories, folklores and experiences began to flow into rich tapestries of experience. Creative re-interpretations of tradition revealed the shifting cultures and experiences that were shaping and reshaping the lives of these young women – and did so from their own perspectives, rather than from the perspectives of outside ‘experts’.

In the very midst of the project's creative activities, however, the Jay Report into child sexual exploitation was released (Jay, 2014), letting loose formerly suppressed fears and anxieties about the population growth and perceptions of Roma communities in parts of Rotherham, especially around the town centre. Immediately upon the report's release, Rotherham's once suppressed racial and cultural tensions came to the surface. Perspectives across the communities changed quickly and significantly, and the growing differences between ethnicities and cultures became the focus of both individual actions and media attention.

It was not the originally intended outcome of this research project to explore the impact of racial tensions within the Roma community. However, the young people participating in the research felt that tension, and it deeply affected the findings and issues that emerged throughout the project. The aftermath of the Jay Report had an inevitable impact on the young people of this community and on the way they saw themselves and their futures.

Beginnings of the project

At the beginning of this project, we set out to examine the use of writing across communities and its role in resilience, development, culture and identity.