Creative Voices: Leeds LGBTQ+ lifeline at risk of becoming a broken dream

In 2025, We’re Right Here launched the Museum of Broken Dreams in Parliament. We heard stories from communities across the country about dreams at risk, dreams shattered, and some that beat the odds to come to life. With limited space to display them, we ended up with an overflow of powerful stories. This blog series shares more of those stories, illustrating the abundant good that community groups are capable of, and how often that potential is frustrated by a lack of trust, means, and support. 

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Isolation runs deep among older LGBTQ+ adults in Leeds. The city has long lacked safe spaces where older LGBTQ+ people can come together and feel accepted as their full selves. For many, life has been shaped by years of invisibility, stigma, and exclusion.

In 2020, community artist and consultant Minoti Parikh began working creatively with older LGBTQ+ adults in Leeds through movement and classical Indian dance. She quickly saw that the value of this work went far beyond the art form. Participants found friendship, rebuilt confidence, and experienced joy and a sense of belonging, not just creative expression. A year later, Minoti founded Creative Voices to continue this work, co-creating community spaces to tackle isolation among older LGBTQ+ people in Leeds.

Despite glowing testimonials from members, Creative Voices’ future remains uncertain. Like many grassroots groups, it relies on precarious short-term funding and support. Read our interview with Minoti Parikh for the Museum of Broken Dreams blog series.

What puts the project at risk is the pressure to keep proving its worth over and over again, despite the evidence of impact.

Minoti Parikh

What drove you to set up Creative Voices?

[Minoti Parikh] The pandemic brought loneliness into the heart of health systems. For older LGBTQ+ individuals, this was something that they experienced long before the pandemic. The pandemic just amplified it and helped community artists like myself to build a connection to this group of individuals who did not feel seen. 

Creative Voices grew from that reality. It was about responding to what was needed and creating a space where people could come as they are, build relationships, explore creativity and feel more alive. What began as an idea has grown into something sustained and meaningful, supported by multiple funders and partners over the last five years in different forms, and continuing to evolve through shared creativity, public sharings and a strong sense of community.

Through performances and creative sharing events, we have seen estranged family members come into the room, reconnect, and begin rebuilding trust. Those moments may not always be easy to measure, but they are life-changing. They ripple far beyond the members themselves.

Spaces like this need support, belief and continuity, not endless scrutiny just to justify their existence.

What difficulties do older LGBTQ+ people face that Creative Voices addresses?

At the heart of Creative Voices is the issue of isolation and poor mental health. People may technically have access to groups or services, but that does not mean those spaces feel safe, affirming, or relevant. They need spaces where they do not have to edit themselves, explain themselves, or carry the burden of being misunderstood. That is what Creative Voices tries to address. It offers a local, creative, community-rooted space where people can show up fully as themselves. 

One member summed it up beautifully by saying that when they come to Creative Voices, they do not have to explain that being a woman does not automatically mean being straight, or clarify how they identify. They can just be. That freedom matters. It is not small. It is the foundation for confidence, belonging and better wellbeing.

What puts the project at risk?

The biggest risk is precarity. Short-term funding is a constant challenge. So is the wider expectation that if a group is valuable, it must eventually fit into a formal model in order to be seen as legitimate.

What puts the project at risk is the pressure to keep proving its worth over and over again, despite the evidence of impact already being there in the lives of members, in the consistency of engagement, in the family ripple effects, and in the partnerships that have backed the work over time. Spaces like this need support, belief, and continuity – not endless scrutiny just to justify their existence.

If Creative Voices were to disappear, what would be the consequences for its members?

If Creative Voices disappeared, members would lose far more than a creative group. They would lose a trusted space of belonging. For many people, this is one of the few places where they feel fully safe, seen, and connected. It gives people a reason to leave the house, something to look forward to, a place to be creative, have fun, and a community that holds them without judgment. That kind of space is not easily replaced.

Creative Voices has enabled the city of Leeds and the people of Leeds to recognise and champion the voices and stories of older LGBTQ plus individuals. We are so proud of producing art expressions through radio shows, short films, storytelling and creative sharing events that help advocate for and build this community’s voice in the city. Creative Voices members have become ambassadors and champions in their own right, helping shift the conversation around what it means to celebrate older LGBTQ+ lives in Leeds.

What could help Creative Voices flourish in the future?

What would help Creative Voices flourish is long-term belief as much as long-term funding.

Consistent funding would allow us to plan ahead, deepen the work, pay artists properly, and continue offering a stable and trusted space for members. But alongside that, what is also needed is recognition that groups like this are valid and necessary, even when they do not sit inside a traditional structure.

Creative Voices is already a strong case study in what can happen when people back the art of the possible. It shows what can be delivered and sustained through partnership, imagination, and resilience. Flourishing would mean being supported not as an exception, but as an essential part of a healthy local ecosystem.

Would stronger community rights and powers help your project and mission?

Creative Voices emerged from listening, noticing, responding, and staying with the work. So yes, stronger rights and powers to influence local decision-making, investment, and public services would help, because they would create more room for lived experience, local knowledge, and community-rooted responses to shape what gets valued and funded.

The most effective solutions are not always the biggest or most formal. Sometimes they are the ones built carefully, relationally and with trust over time. If local decision-making genuinely made more space for that kind of work, projects like Creative Voices would not have to fight quite so hard to be recognised for the essential role they already play.

Visit the exhibition: Museum of Broken Dreams