Wishing you all a Warm Winter: One Pager Festive Summary of our 2025

This has been such an exceptional year for us at Room to Be. From being the tiniest seed of an idea we have grown to a community of over 30 people, creating safe spaces, social opportunities, gardening endeavours and artistic adventures. It has been an absolute joy and pleasure to be a part of. Merry Festivities one and all! Go forth and spread glitter in the hearts of all you meet.

If you'd like more detail of our annual overview and hear about our journey this year, please continue reading. I hope that this informal report shows that Room to Be could not have managed to achieve so much without all our supporters and allies. This support has come at a crucial time during a year that has hit hard the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly our trans siblings. So from the bottom of our big, bright and beautiful queer hearts, we want to say thank you for being there.

Reporting back about 2025

In January, Emile and Mel were awarded a Changemakers microgrant to set up an LGBTQIA+ community group based around gardening and creativity for wellbeing. Emile spent the first two months developing the website as a digital platform and spreading the word through local community networks and known safe spaces. Within the first week five people had expressed an interest.

We knew from the very beginning that we did not want to have an official presence on social media platforms. To understand why, we wrote an article: To Scroll or not to Scroll? That is the question. We are aware that this will impact our reach, but we are comfortable with a slow build through word of mouth and genuine connection.

The project was initially named Let's Build a Garden, until the infinitely more catchy Room to Be was stumbled across whilst reading a Creative Dundee article, Room to Be: LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Creative Spaces. Credit where credit is due, thank you Creative Dundee for writing this article.

Queer artist and friend, Tess Farlow very kindly donated her time and skills to create our amazing logo for the group which represents a rainbow encased in a room with so much life growing from it. If you would like to see more of Tess's work you can find her on social media platforms, The Inklings of Tess.

During these early preparation and planning months, Emile reached out to counsellor Heather Anderson and Lynne Short who expressed their support and enabled further council connections in a bid to find a suitable place for the project. Thank you Kate Treharne and Val Kane in particular from the city council who gave us time and energy this year. And thank you to Catherine Lawson from Bonnie Dundee for being one of the first community groups to reach out to us to find ways to include and support.

We officially launched on March the 1st at Cake or Dice, our first partner of Room to Be. The team at Cake or Dice have helped support us grow through the use of their space, sharing our news and giving advice. We look forward to celebrating our birthday next spring with them and developing more collaborations and mutually beneficial ways of working.

The Green Team is our weekly meet-up group which focuses on all our green elements: gardening, nature connection, climate change and sustainability. We have had approximately 30 Green Team sessions this year and we couldn't have done that without the Dundee Grow Network, which we are very proud members of, and our second partnership, the Boomerang Community Centre in Stobswell. The team at Boomerang welcomed us in April and gave us the use of the facilities and storage for our tools, enabling our first growing season with their three raised beds. We are so pleased to have won a Changemakers SOUP pitch later in the year to build a planting and seating area by the beds for our gardeners and the Boomerang community centre to enjoy. This is how we came to meet our third partnership of the year, Dundee Makerspace, who has been helping us with the build.

Chill/Create is our monthly creative social at Cake or Dice which was launched in April this year. It is a very relaxed social get-together where people come along with their own creative project or they can get involved with whatever art activity is on the table. We have had 6 Chill/Create sessions for our members this year.

By April we were a membership of 15 and we decided to formalise our community group. On the 16th of April we had our first AGM and democratically voted on our committee members and agreed on our constitution. We signed up as members of the Consortium who offer networking, funding opportunity, guidance and support to LGBT+ organisations and community groups.

At the beginning of the summer, Room to Be participated in the Eden Project Communities BIG LUNCH, which is a national annual UK-wide event celebrating community spirit and encouraging people to come together to share food. We realised how meaningful it was to eat around a table together and we knew we wanted to incorporate more meal-sharing into our future timetable. By midsummer our membership was at 22.

Seasonal Arts Programme: our creative team within the committee wished to develop art participation further and brought together a programme celebrating the changing seasons and the Celtic year. We have had 3 celebrations: Lughnasadh, Samhain and Yule which offered a creative activity to reflect the season and a meal sharing pot luck supper. These workshops have been hugely popular amongst our membership with our highest attendance of the year being for the weaving workshop led by Anna Rooney celebrating Samhain in November. 14 of our now 30 members attended.

Collaboration with Art and Nature Collective: Room to Be was awarded the opportunity to collaborate with artists Manuela del los Rios and Lana al Khateeb to create an art installation combining queer voices, music, sounds from nature, photography, prints and written words. The project is called Listen to the Lavender and will invite people to sit in a garden setting and listen to what our community has to say about the need for safe spaces and connecting with nature. This project was funded by the Climate Fund.

Collaboration with RSPB and Boomerang Community Centre: The RSPB's Wild Dundee has received council funding to deliver wildlife development planting in Stobswell and we will be part of the design and planting at the Boomerang community centre and Wee Forest. Lindsey Gibbs who is managing the project very kindly organised on our request the soil physicist David Boldwin of the James Hutton Institute to join us on World Soil Say (the 5th of December). This soil testing workshop was opened up to the Grow Dundee Network and Permaculture Group and was the first of our workshops to have an extended invite. We were delighted to have 3 guests join us on the day.

Cultural trips, social opportunities and networking: Throughout the year we have offered our members further cultural trips, social opportunities and skill sharing through networks we are a part of. These include:

• A Dundee Rep theatre trip to see Inside Giovanni's Room made available to us through connecting with Dundee Central Library.

• Active participation in the Grow Network which included the V&A mini garden display celebrating the launch of the Garden Futures exhibition.

• Free tickets from DCA for a cinema outing during Pride month (Bent)

• Free guided tour from DCA at the art exhibition On Motherhood

• Participation in DJCAD's resident artist AJ Stockwell's Strange Strangers: Queer Ecology group, including a trip to Dundee Botanical Garden.

• A social day trip to Ninewells Community Garden, Big Biodiversity Bash.

• A whittling workshop with the Dundee Eden Project's Stobbie Jammin'.

• Active participation in the Changemakers network which offers skill shares, workshops and events including tickets to see Rob Hopkins: How to fall in love with the Future

• Involvement in the Changemakers Dundee Dots: alternative currency pilot leading to further partnerships with MAXwell Centre and Uppertunity and trading with ScrapAntics and Roundhouse.

• Attendance at the Proud Futures conference in Glasgow, celebrating queer leadership.

• Free tickets to see Creative Dundee's PechaKucha evening, gifted to committee members for all their hard work this year.

Inclusivi-T: On April 23rd this year, the Supreme Court ruling (For Women Scotland VS Scottish Ministers) came crashing down onto the heads of the trans community, ruling that the legal definition of 'man' and 'woman' with regards to the Equality Act 2010 was biological sex. Although lauded by some politicians as finally giving clarity it has created a surge of transphobia, misinformation, discrimination, harassment and abuse. This was further exacerbated by the EHRC guidance which was hastily published insisting there was a legal imperative to exclude all trans people from single sex spaces and public facilities, such as toilets and changing rooms. The EHRC went on to quietly retract this guidance until a formal consultation took place, but the damage had been done. There has been a sudden uptick in transphobic hate crimes since this ruling and the trans community are progressively being stripped of their rights to fully participate within society. This includes trans people being excluded from sports and further exclusion of the trans community from single sex services and organisations that have for years been happily trans inclusive.

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, Room to Be created Inclusivi-T. This started with a view to provide social opportunities and outreach specifically for the trans community, but has since developed its focus on strengthening allyship and improving understanding in our own humble attempt to diminish fear and misinformation locally. We ran a listening group as a pilot project called Toxic Gender and we are hoping that this is something we will develop further in 2026 along with allyship training and workshops.

On Transgender Day of Remembrance this year (November 20th), Room to Be planted the first tree of their Forest Garden project in honour of trans lives lost. The Forest Garden is a permaculture project we will be working on in 2026.

We are still a nomadic group by nature, though the dream is to one day have a space we can call our own. In the meantime, we are so grateful of all the community gardens and organisations who have made it possible for us to operate this year. So thank you Cake or Dice, Boomerang, MAXwell Centre, Launch It Studios and Ninewells Community Garden for allowing us a room to be.

Isn't it amazing how much can be squeezed into one year?

Room to Be has now wound down for a much needed festive break, but we can't wait to come back together on Saturday January 10th.

This is our final One Pager Newsletter update until March 2026.

Wishing you all a warm winter!