Coming full circle — and making our voices count

Romany Gypsy campaigner and director Violet Cannon reflects on coming full circle as Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC joins Leeds GATE in delivering Designed By Us — a long‑term health equalities project shaped by community knowledge and leadership.

I was Leeds GATE’s first full-time employee. It was my first full-time job in the Gypsy and Traveller voluntary sector, and a place where an important part of my journey began, writes Violet Cannon.

Now, after almost three decades working with our communities, I am returning as a director of Proud Gypsy Traveller, working alongside Leeds GATE on Designed By Us.

That feels personal. There is pride in it, and a responsibility to make this opportunity count.

Because I am a Romany Gypsy woman before I am a job title. These are our families, our children and our futures we are talking about. When a project ends or funding moves on, we still live with whatever has changed — and whatever hasn’t.

Proud Gypsy Traveller has its own full-circle story.

More than a decade ago, it began as a Heritage Lottery-funded project, bringing together our voices, photographs, memories and histories. We made exhibitions, books and newspapers where people could see their own families and stories represented with pride.

People kept those books. They remembered the exhibitions. Years later, they were still asking us to bring Proud Gypsy Traveller back.

That stayed with me. Something we had created together still mattered enough for people to want it again.

So, we brought it back as Proud Gypsy Traveller CIC, led entirely by Gypsy and Traveller directors. We carried those relationships and that history with us, alongside a determination to have more say over what happens next.

Designed By Us is part of that next chapter.

Thanks to National Lottery players, our partnership with Leeds GATE has received five years of funding from The National Lottery Community Fund to address health inequities affecting Ethnic Gypsy and Traveller communities across areas of Yorkshire.

Five years gives us room to listen properly, build trust and follow through. I want us to use that time well.

Our communities don’t need another project that simply tells us how unequal our health is. We already live that reality.

We know what it means when racism follows you into a service that is supposed to help.

We know how insecure accommodation wears people down, how grief accumulates, and how exhausting it is to keep explaining your life to people who hold the power to make it harder.

And still, too often, we are asked to tell our stories again.

We answer the questions. We revisit painful experiences. We share knowledge built through generations of surviving systems that were never designed with us in mind.

Then someone else decides what our words mean and what should happen next.

I want that to change.

Designed By Us will work with Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy Travellers through paid peer research, youth leadership and practitioner training. Community members will help set the priorities, shape the research and see the findings before they are taken into health systems.

Paying people matters to me. Our knowledge is expertise. Our time has value. Being passionate about our communities should never mean being expected to work for free.

I want young people to have opportunities to lead now. I want adults who have spent years holding families and communities together to have their knowledge recognised. And I want services and commissioners to take responsibility for what they do with that knowledge.

An invitation into a meeting is only a beginning. The real question is whether we can influence the decisions made there.

Will services change? Will funding follow the priorities communities identify? Will people be able to get help without having to fight to be understood?

Those are the questions I want this work to keep asking.

Working alongside Leeds GATE also gives us an opportunity to strengthen Proud Gypsy Traveller as an independent community-led organisation. We need organisations with the resources to employ our people, develop our skills and stay alongside communities over the long term.

There is strength in helping each other grow. Our communities deserve a sector that can do that generously.

I am excited about Designed By Us. I am also conscious of how often our people have been promised change. Five years of funding carries a responsibility to turn good intentions into something families can feel.

For me, success will be in the help someone receives, the respect they are shown and the decisions they have the power to influence. It will be in what our children and grandchildren inherit.

The original Proud Gypsy Traveller helped make our stories visible. Now I want those voices to carry power.

Coming full circle means something to me. But I haven’t come back just to celebrate how far we’ve travelled.

I want us to change where we’re going.

By Violet Cannon

(Image © Designed By Us)