Finding her voice
A groundbreaking program is empowering girls to believe in themselves, and to be catalysts for change in their disadvantaged communities
Artistic expression is a powerful skill: it can be healing and cathartic, and help people to give voice to feelings and ideas they would otherwise never be able to share. And for the past five years, a program developed in North-West Tasmania has been using artistic expression to combat family violence and gender inequality. The results have been so positive that Project O has been duplicated around the country, helping young women as far away as Broome in Western Australia.
Created by acclaimed Tasmanian social change, arts and media organisation Big hART, Project O started in 2015 as a way to enable young women aged 11-16 to gain confidence, agency and leadership skills, and be changemakers in their communities.
The “O” of the project’s name comes from the character Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There are 31,000 words in Hamlet and Ophelia is given about 1000.
This “literary glass ceiling” has been taken up as a potent metaphor for the deeply entrenched inequalities still faced by women the world over. And the inherent artistic reference is a symbol of the way Project O is seeking to create more balance, encouraging young women to find their voice, and to use various artistic outlets to express ideas that affect their lives and challenge institutional sexism.
The project has a focus on remote or disadvantaged communities – places where gender inequality and family violence tend to be more entrenched and prevalent.
The theory is that if women are enabled to realise their full potential and abilities from a young age, they are more likely – and better equipped – to challenge oppressive social norms and structures, and thereby change them.
And when it comes to breaking the cycle of family violence, building the self esteem and sense of worth of those most likely to be affected is a big step in the right direction. According to project producer Rachel Small, the younger girls entering the program now are seeing the older alumni as aspirational figures to emulate, which is a sure sign the message is getting through and change is happening.
“Project O has been running for five years now and it already has this legacy, where the younger girls have seen the older ones running some sort of cool event and they say ‘hey, I want to do that, too’,” Small says.
“They’re seeing older girls they know go through and come out as more confident people, and they want in on it. This year we are seeing a lot of siblings of the original girls coming through as well, and we are starting to see this microgenerational shift in attitudes now. It’s quite exciting.”
Project O national director and Big hART associate director Genevieve Dugard has been involved with the initiative since its inception in 2015, when it started life as a project to help build confidence and agency in young women on the North-West Coast. But when Rosie Batty was named 2015 Australian of the year for her work raising awareness of family violence, it led to a shift for Project O.
“A few months after we launched, the whole national discourse around family violence exploded,” Dugard says. “We were originally called Project Ophelia and looking at ways to combat inequality and give young women a voice.
“And as we saw that family violence discourse take off, we realised that the strategies we were using in our project could be used to combat that as well, since family violence has its roots in issues of inequality. So it grew from there and now Project O has been trialled in five states and territories and is currently being run in three.”
Very soon after Project O’s launch, it caught the attention of Batty herself. She praised the way it was creating generational change and is now a vocal supporter of the program.
“I was invited to Hobart by the children’s commissioner to launch a report and he had involved young women from Project O to host and MC the event,” Batty says. “I was so impressed by them and I got to know them that way.
“Project O is running in Frankston, Victoria, which is where I live. It’s been going for maybe a year now and it’s amazing to see the young women who are starting to have this opportunity to shine and rebuild their self confidence.”
Batty was the face of Project O’s latest initiative, called This Is Us, which took place throughout the month of March to mark International Women’s Day.
It involved the three current locations for Project O – the North-West Coast, Frankston and Roebourne in WA’s Pilbara – all working together to produce vibrant events where they advocated for change. This is Us involved invitation-only events, at which young women took to the stage and shared digital portraits, immersive soundscapes and films they had made about the ideas and issues that were important to them.
Wynyard High School student Kyla Gardam, 15, was one of the participants in This Is Us and says a special gala event earlier this year marked her first time doing public speaking.
“We were doing the presenting at the event and I had never spoken publicly like that before,” she says. “I was so nervous. But once I was doing it, I felt really confident and it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”
Public speaking really can be terrifying for many people, so even giving young people the confidence to do this, and be pushed out of their comfort zone, represents a huge step for Project O participants.
“It’s been a good way of spending time with friends as well – being more social, finding more ways to be social,” Gardam says. “I’m a really shy person but everything we’ve done has made me more confident. I believe in myself a lot more now than I did at the start.
“My older sister was one of the first ones to go through Project O, and she was very shy, and she definitely changed a lot during that program. I wanted to do it, too.”
If encouraging the participants to create and run their own public events helps build confidence, then exposing them to new artistic pursuits helps open their eyes to new worlds of possibility, new ways to share their ideas, and the realisation that they have more options open to them than they may have realised.
“I’ve done some photography and animation with Project O,” Gardam says. “I’d never done either before this. Now I want to be a writer when I’m older.”
Project O alumnus Kaytlyn Johnson, 18, moved to Melbourne at the start of the year to start a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Melbourne and says she owes a great deal to her mentors and friends at Project O.
Also a former Wynyard High School student, Johnson was in Grade 8 when she signed up to Project O, simply because she heard there were dancing workshops.
“I wanted to dance,” she says. “The school asked if anyone was interested in this thing. Myself and a few friends thought it would be cool. We had no idea what other things it was going to lead to.
“First off it developed slowly, doing mindfulness games and team-building exercises, meditation – stuff to help with overall mental wellbeing. Then it grew into a more entrepreneurial program, facilitating and organising our own events, contacting local businesses to put those events on, building confidence through doing things like that.”
Prior to Project O, Johnson had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, and says she had few aspirations beyond school. But as well as giving her the confidence to successfully apply to do a science degree interstate, the program emboldened her to pursue her love of music.
Johnson performed one of her original songs at the Acoustic Life of Sheds event in 2017, and rapped with Lucky Oceans and band on stage at the 2019 Acoustic Life of Sheds.
“I’ve always wanted to play music and Project O helped me to see that there’s no idea too crazy; if there’s an opportunity, take it,” Johnson says.
“I’d always wanted to write my own stuff. I’ve been writing music ever since I can remember. I only had the chance to show what I can do and perform through Project O. They amplified that for me, allowed me to be mentored by (singer-songwriter) Claire Anne Taylor – work with her one-on-one – and performing with her was insane. I couldn’t believe it.”
But using that newfound confidence for her own career and artistic pursuits is only half the equation. Being more confident and assertive also leads to being more active and visible in other ways. Through their freshly discovered voices, the girls of Project O go on to address the pressing social issues of gender inequality and family violence.
“BighART gave us a platform,” Johnson says. “There was already a lot of potential in our group – they were all pretty inspiring girls already – but then we got opportunities to speak up