Lillia Barnaby-Fuller, Think 4 Brum chair, shares her experience of Womanhood for International Women’s day
Lillia Barnaby-Fuller, Think4Brum Chair is using her role to speak up about the female community and female empowerment beyond International Women’s Day.
Think4Brum is a youth participation group made up of service users who use their lived experiences to help shape our mental health services (MHS).
The group works with our MHS teams to better our care for future service users.
Lillia sat down to talk about the importance of International Women’s Day for young people in the community especially within Think4Brum and the need for female empowerment to be recognised beyond the day.
Lillia shared: "I’m a young woman. I don’t think a woman should only be celebrated once a year on International Women’s Day or even twice a year including Mother’s day.
"We should be celebrated all year round. I don't think I’ve made my mark yet, as I’m still developing myself and growing as a person."
The Think4Brum team of inspiring young people have already contributed to significant and impactful change within our 0-25s mental health services, Forward Thinking Birmingham (FTB).
When asked what International Women's day means to her Laila explained: "One key thing would be the idea of female empowerment embodying sisterhood and community which are all hugely under-looked things.
"Some may not know but even the female community can have divides. Some can be cultural and some could be sexual orientation based."
Lillia opened up about her concerns for the future of the female community. She said: "This makes me lose hope in having a diverse female community that is representative of so many women from various ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQIA+ women.
"Our own prejudices may lead to preconceived perceptions and assumptions of a woman because of the way she looks like: her skin colour for example, as many black women can be subject to labels such as having attitude and being aggressive but unfortunately it’s not just men that say those things to black women, it’s other women also.
However, Lillia is still somewhat positive when it comes to the future of female empowerment. She said: "What’s promising though is the future there’s lots more diversity and with this comes people of different backgrounds where you’ll hopefully enrich one another."
For more information about Think4Brum please visit our website