We didn’t apply because Gypsy & Traveller Communities needed another toolkit. We applied because our experiences needed to enter different rooms.
When a small Community Researcher Crisis Planning commission came up with Story Of The Changing, we applied for a reason that went well beyond the money.
Yes, it was a small funded project. Yes, we eventually produced two illustrated pieces of work. But for us, this was never really about creating another resource for Gypsy & Traveller Communities.
We have plenty of conversations amongst ourselves.
What interested us was the room.
Why we chose to apply
Story Of The Changing describes itself as a “radical artist-led enquiry into the end of empire” and talks openly about healing, collective liberation and building a future where empire is obsolete.
Its Community Researcher programme deliberately prioritised people with marginalised identities and described Black and Global Majority people as including Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people, alongside migrants, refugees, queer and trans people, disabled and neurodivergent people, working-class communities and others whose identities are marginalised or under threat from systems, the state and the media.
You can read more about that approach in Story Of The Changing’s Community Researcher open call.
That interested us because Gypsy & Traveller Communities are so often missing from exactly these wider conversations about race, empire, systems, state power, identity and collective liberation.
There are spaces where people expect to hear about Gypsy & Traveller inequality: planning meetings, council meetings, Traveller conferences, equality events and consultations specifically about us.
Those spaces matter. But if we only ever speak about our experiences in rooms already labelled “Gypsy and Traveller”, we risk having the same conversations with the same people.
Sometimes the important thing is getting our experiences into rooms where they have not previously been part of the discussion.
That was why we applied.
A very small commission — but a bigger opportunity
The Community Researcher micro commission was £400 for the researcher’s time, with the programme also allowing researchers to request additional material costs where needed.
We did not ask Story Of The Changing to pay for printing our finished documents. Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC paid those printing costs ourselves because, once the work was produced, we wanted people to be able to hold it, read it and share it physically as well as digitally.
The size of the grant was never the point for us. The opportunity to put some of our communities’ experiences in front of a different audience was.
What does crisis planning look like when the system is part of the crisis?
Story Of The Changing asked community researchers to explore crisis planning: what communities need when something goes wrong, and what knowledge already exists within marginalised communities that rarely makes it into formal systems.
For us, that immediately raised a question.
What does crisis planning actually look like for a Gypsy or Traveller family?
Because sometimes the obvious answer on paper simply does not exist in real life.
We focused particularly on what happens when a woman with children needs to leave domestic abuse.
The mainstream answer can sound straightforward: leave, go somewhere safe, stay with family, approach the council, ask for emergency accommodation.
But the women and families we spoke with described a much more complicated reality.
“Go back to family” is not always a real option
For many Gypsy and Traveller people, accommodation is already scarce.
A parent may have a pitch and desperately want their daughter and grandchildren to come home — but strict planning or occupancy conditions can mean taking in another caravan or household could put the wider family in breach.
And this is not only an issue on local-authority sites.
Private Gypsy and Traveller sites can also carry tight planning conditions. A family can have land, physical space and the willingness to help while planning controls make that space effectively unavailable during a crisis.
That means a woman can be told to “go somewhere safe” while one of the safest places she knows — her own family — may not legally be able to accommodate her without risking consequences for everybody else.
You cannot properly understand somebody’s ability to leave if you do not understand where they are actually allowed to go.
And then there is power
Another issue families wanted us to name was much less visible.
On some local-authority sites, residents described a very real sense that they needed to “stay in” with the people who manage the site.
That phrase matters.
Because in a crisis, families may need discretion.
Can a daughter bring a caravan onto her mother’s pitch for a few nights? Can grandchildren stay? Will somebody allow temporary flexibility while safer accommodation is found? Will enforcement begin immediately? Can a family simply have a little bit of time?
On paper, these decisions may sit within policies and procedures. But families described how, in practice, relationships with individual council employees, site managers or wardens could feel enormously important.
That can create a deeply uncomfortable balance of power.
A resident may be unhappy about repairs. They may believe they have been treated unfairly. They may experience language or behaviour they want to challenge.
But another calculation can sit underneath it:
What if I complain today and next month my daughter needs somewhere to run to?
Sometimes people know their rights perfectly well. They are also calculating risk.
The safest option can carry consequences of its own
This became one of the most important lessons from the work.
Crisis decisions do not happen in a vacuum.
A woman fleeing violence can be choosing between different forms of risk. Staying may be dangerous. Leaving may mean homelessness. Returning to family may expose her parents to planning enforcement. Challenging an unfair decision may be completely justified while potentially damaging a relationship she believes her family may need later.
That is harm reduction in its messiest form.
Not choosing between a good option and a bad option.
Choosing between options that all carry consequences.
Identity became part of the conversation too
As the work developed, another form of crisis kept appearing: what happens when systems cannot even record who you are properly?
That became Identity on Paper.
It looks at the experiences of Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy/Travellers navigating official systems where ethnicity can be absent, collapsed into broad categories or recorded incorrectly.
Again, the point was bigger than the finished document.
We wanted to put Gypsy and Traveller experiences into a wider discussion about racialisation, institutional power, identity, data and the systems that decide which identities are legible.
That does not mean pretending every marginalised community has the same history. We do not.
But there are conversations we can have with one another about what happens when institutions decide whose knowledge counts, whose behaviour is treated as troublesome, who is expected to adapt, and who gets designed out of the system entirely.
Gypsy & Traveller voices belong in those conversations.
What came out of the conversation
We produced two illustrated pieces from the commission. They are useful outputs, but they were never the whole purpose of taking part.
Crisis Planning for Gypsy & Traveller Families: When Leaving Isn’t Just Leaving
This explores domestic abuse, family support, local-authority site power, planning and occupancy controls, site insecurity, institutional discretion and the practical calculations families may make when trying to keep somebody safe.
Use the page controls at the top of the document to move through the full PDF.
Identity on Paper: A crisis-planning toolkit for Gypsy and Traveller people navigating official systems
This explores identity recording, erasure and the practical experience of navigating systems that have not always been designed to recognise our communities accurately.
Use the page controls at the top of the document to move through the full PDF.
This was about dialogue, not another document on a shelf
I do not want us to retrospectively pretend that our main ambition was to create two toolkits for our own community.
It wasn’t.
Our ambition was to put some of our experiences somewhere they might travel further.
We need people working around domestic abuse to understand why “just leave” or “go to family” can be profoundly inadequate advice.
We need housing and planning professionals to understand that a planning condition can become a barrier to safety.
We need people concerned with decolonisation and racial justice to understand that Gypsy & Traveller experiences belong within those conversations too.
We need people outside our communities who understand what institutional discretion can mean when your family’s home and your daughter’s immediate safety may depend upon it.
And we need to listen too. Other marginalised communities carry knowledge about survival, identity, state power, resistance, community and healing that we can learn from.
That is where new allies can begin.
Sometimes the outcome is the relationship
For a £400 research commission, we produced quite a lot of paper.
But paper was never the most interesting outcome.
The more important question is whether somebody who had never previously thought about a Gypsy woman being unable to flee violence because of a planning condition now thinks about it.
Whether somebody discussing colonial systems begins to recognise Gypsy and Traveller experiences within that conversation.
Whether somebody working on racial justice sees another community that should be standing in that room.
Whether somebody who heard us through the Community Wisdom Hub later becomes an ally in another room where we are not present.
Those things are much harder to put into an outcomes spreadsheet.
But they are often how change starts.
Not with everybody agreeing. Not with another glossy toolkit sitting on a shelf.
With somebody hearing something they had not heard before.
Recognising something.
Asking another question.
And perhaps, the next time Gypsy & Traveller Communities are being talked about somewhere we are absent, somebody else in that room saying:
“Have we actually asked them?”
That was why this small project mattered to us.
— Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC