The Cultural Bridging Project worked with several voluntary and statutory organisations that showed interest in this project. This project involved sharing cultures, ideas and skills with each other through different activities.

The primary purpose of the project was to facilitate cultural bridging in the local communities to promote social inclusion for South Asian women in Edinburgh.

The project entailed two-way cultural bridging activities to raise awareness of Scottish/Asian cultural needs and issues among local communities, that, it hoped would help towards social inclusion of disadvantaged grass root South Asians in the mainstream local communities. 

The activities included information around local South Asian people’s lifestyle, food, language, culture and religion, and several barriers faced by both South Asians and mainstream local communities to network and progress towards community cohesion.

All of this happened in the form of cultural bridging sessions for mainstream local communities as well as South Asian women.  The sessions took place initially separately and then participation in sessions together in more inclusive ways took place where information exchange was facilitated among women from various backgrounds.

The cultural bridging sessions included discussion sessions around barriers, issues and needs of both communities to develop community cohesion strategies locally.

Activities were organised that raised awareness of other cultures i.e. history, food, language, religion, lifestyle, etc. Interaction was created through information exchange among youth clubs, pre-school childcare, parenting skills exchange among young mothers, interaction of older people’s lunch clubs visits and cookery, sewing and creative writing activities.

Training sessions were held for South Asian women to develop their skills to be able to work in mainstream projects i.e. catering & nutrition, childcare, sewing, leadership training etc.

Cultural awareness sessions were held for both South Asian women and local mainstream communities.

The client group to be targeted mainly was South Asian disadvantaged communities and local mainstream communities/agencies.

Working with both communities enabled the organisation to address issues of social exclusion by plugging cultural awareness gaps among both communities and facilitated a platform where community cohesion issues were discussed.