Shared Pathways - Women Walking

Shared Pathways (Women Walking)

Current Project | 2025–2026

Shared Pathways is a twelve-month creative wellbeing programme that brings together women from Calderdale's diverse communities through shared walking, photography and storytelling. Combining physical activity with creative reflection, the project explores how moving together through landscapes can foster confidence, friendship and a deeper sense of belonging.

Many of the women involved have little experience of recreational walking and rarely travel beyond their own neighbourhoods. For some, unfamiliar areas of Calderdale—or even nearby countryside—can feel inaccessible or unsafe. Shared Pathways responds by creating supportive multicultural walking groups where women explore one another's communities together, gradually replacing uncertainty with familiarity, confidence and trust.

Each walk becomes an opportunity to experience Calderdale through someone else's eyes. Participants visit neighbourhoods, heritage sites, cultural landmarks and natural landscapes while sharing personal stories about home, migration, memory and identity. The act of walking together creates space for informal conversation, allowing relationships to develop naturally across differences of age, culture, faith and life experience.

Alongside the walks, participants take part in mindful photography workshops led by a professional artist. Photography becomes a creative tool for noticing the overlooked: inviting women to capture places that hold personal meaning, moments of beauty encountered unexpectedly, and landscapes that evoke belonging or reflection. These images become starting points for deeper conversations about identity, heritage and place, while encouraging participants to see both their own environments and those of others with renewed curiosity.

The creative outcomes are brought together in a collaboratively produced publication featuring photography, poetry, drawings and reflective writing. Distributed through Calderdale libraries and community organisations, the publication extends the conversations beyond the participants themselves, inviting wider audiences to reflect on the relationships between landscape, culture and community. Public exhibitions and celebration events provide further opportunities for dialogue, enabling participants to share their experiences while encouraging greater understanding between communities.

The project builds upon Verd de Gris Arts' long-standing commitment to creating opportunities for meaningful encounters between people who may otherwise have little opportunity to meet. Through partnerships with health providers, refugee organisations, community groups and the One Voice Collective, Shared Pathways reaches women who are often excluded from both cultural participation and outdoor activity, ensuring that the programme is shaped by lived experience and supported through trusted peer relationships.

Ultimately, Shared Pathways demonstrates that wellbeing is about more than exercise alone. By walking together through shared landscapes, listening to one another's stories and creating work that enters the public realm, participants discover not only new places but new ways of understanding each other. The project transforms walking into an act of cultural exchange, showing how creativity, movement and conversation can strengthen confidence, improve wellbeing and build lasting connections across Calderdale's diverse communities.