The final week of my LiA has been busy with finishing content creation, designing presentations and videos, and thanking everyone we've worked with. It's been a constant exercise in humility, to recognise the contributions of everyone who has enabled this experience, and how our work fits into this massive, global challenge of gender violence, which still has such a long way to go.

It was a long weekend of sewing and adjusting - my apologies to the cleaner who had to deal with all the tiny bits of thread all over my floor 🙏 But we finally finished creating our feminist puppet, Emancy, and spent all of the first half of the week filming videos of her, to use in our content for Las Sabinas. I really appreciated the creative side of our work, which allowed us to have fun at the same time as making progress. Our volunteers were incredibly helpful in the final few days, in finishing up editing videos, and responding to feedback and suggested improvements.

The last few days of the programme were dedicated to showcasing our work to each other, the volunteers, and representatives from all the organisations our scholars worked with. It was inspiring to listen to the other scholars talk about their own work: we'd of course been aware of what they'd been doing along the way, but I felt so much pride listening to them explain how they'd lead workshops, made booklets, and redesigned websites to support their organisations too. We also designed and performed our own presentation, which was a significant challenge in public speaking, but our audience was very supportive, and the feedback we got from make_sense over the week leading up to the presentations helped us to deliver it with confidence.

One of my favourite parts of the week was our internal closing, in which we discussed what we're taking away from the programme, and what we've learned. Our coordinators, Nuri and Keni, used the opportunity to express their gratitude for us, and what we'd individually brought to the programme. We also wrote notes of gratitude to each other, which we put in envelopes for us to each take home a package of kind notes that had been written about us. It was a lovely exercise in humility, to remind us how we all helped each other to both achieve good outcomes for our organisations, and to develop our characters throughout the 6 weeks.

Here's the video we made to summarise our project: https://www.veed.io/view/c5f6fe6a-94f4-4a6f-ba77-d4cf84fdd728?panel=share

It's been such a pleasure to work with make_sense americas, Las Sabinas, and my fellow Laidlaw Scholars on this programme! I look forward to staying in contact, and seeing what amazing work they all do in the future 😊