ROAAAR came from a place of working in commercial safety training companies blended with experience of working within journalism and providing workshops for all women and non binary safe space training in our base location of Birmingham in the UK.

Our little seed of an idea came from blending this experience whilst being a part of the late Impact Hub Birmingham and creating Birmingham’s one and only Intersectional Womxn’s Day festival powered by womxn and non binary artists, performers and makers called P.M.T (Powering the Matriarchy Together)

We wanted to open the way to try to open up spaces that help folk build resilience to challenges we often face as women – cis, trans or femme and non binary folk. It was a seed of an idea that came from our founder working as a hostile environment trainer for freelance journalists and photographers, something which she is still very much involved in. 

We approach personal safety like a bowl of spaghetti – strands weaving together, some having a direct connection and others far apart but leading to all being in the same dish. We believe to challenge age old entrenched systems our approach needs to span many themes to bring a more collective approach to safety training, where profit is not the aim, but wealth of knowledge and connection thrives.

ROAAAR works towards creating and evolving workshops to meet the needs of multiple concerns around safety in relation to identity and trauma informed content. Our community of trainers represent these identities and therefore we feel best placed to create and facilitate content to uplift us and help us to feel safe in our own skin.