I treat anyone who parachutes into Doncaster for a quick soundbite on a devastating social issue with disdain. Throughout my life, I have been introduced to well-intentioned journalists, experts, art professionals, academics and consultants in positions of privilege, and their agenda is always the same: they want to get to know you so that they can tell your story. Or maybe they have been commissioned to innovate something that will improve our lives. Locally, we call it “another flash in the pan”. In 2018, the sculptor Laurence Edwards was commissioned to create a miners’ statue for our town – as the daughter of a miner and someone passionate about preserving my heritage I was initially enthralled. Local people were invited to have their heads sculpted, while being interviewed about the strike and its aftermath. By chance, a year later, I discovered that an edition of the heads was on sale in a gallery in Mayfair for £2,895 each. The artist said this was an oversight, but it felt painful to have my family’s trauma commodified and sold in this way. When I met the Guardian film-maker John Domokos, my first instinct was to be wary of him. He was awarded funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and was looking to make a film about Doncaster. He’d come across a local magazine I co-founded with my friend Warren Draper. Doncopolitan started out as a tongue-in-cheek response to the town’s attempt to win city status in 2010. It later became a vessel to help Doncaster find its creative voice, and we didn’t stop there – we ran a studio space, an intern programme and a festival and launched an urban farm. Despite the praise and interest in our work, I was still cautious. In 2010, the French national newspaper Le Monde interviewed me. The article was headlined Quelque chose de cassé à Doncaster (There’s something broken in Doncaster), and below was a photograph of me and my nan cuddling on the sofa in her council bungalow. The framing was personally offensive, but all the more because of a cumulative effect of negative coverage about my town over the years. The news reports about the spice epidemic, fly-tipping and high street shop closures. These stories overlook the grassroots groups who litter pick or the thriving independent businesses in the area. My friends who are ex-miners are called gammon, thick and idiots for voting for Brexit. They are defined by flippant soundbites, captured by journalists eager to explain the disillusionment in simple terms. Our communities are some of the poorest and most neglected areas in northern Europe. Over the years, precarious work in factories, warehouses and care homes replaced stable, long-term unionised jobs. Recently Dave Douglass, a key leader during the 1984 strike, described the town of Stainforth to me: “My heart falls into my boots when I go back as I remember what life was like before.” Life in Doncaster, like life anywhere in the country, is complicated. At the time Domokos contacted me I was nominated for a BBC regional creative champion award while struggling to find grants to keep the magazine going. All the while, I was working at a hospice in palliative care running art activities with patients. I found myself in a position where I was burned out, in debt and unable to sustain anything I was doing. The last thing on my mind was allowing a London-based film-maker to follow me around with his camera. Especially as he was funded to do so and I was struggling not only to survive, but to keep my own grassroots project afloat. I told him bluntly: “I don’t want to be the subject of your work.” I didn’t want to talk to him about how difficult life had been, seeing the lives of people close to me spiral out of control due to cuts and low pay. Ironically, the aim of his project was to find people like me that could articulate our struggle. Yet I was still concerned that this could be some “poverty porn” documentary, where I had no control over how I was represented. But Domokos did something I’d seen very few people do when parachuting into Doncaster. He actually listened, put his agenda to one side and made me a co-producer of his film. It was a controversial decision, to give me the power to be both subject and creator, but only by making journalism more collaborative, empowering and solution focused can we break out of one-dimensional representations of working-class communities, and do justice to complex social issues. So we reached out to local film-makers Rajnish Madaan, Ryan Harston and and Kylie Noble, who became part of the production team, and two other female activists whose work needed exposure. I introduced Domokos to Lindsay McGlone, a 21-year-old with 18,000 Instagram followers. She is known as “The Fat Fierce Feminist”, speaking at universities and appearing in national media raising awareness about discrimination and fat liberation. I introduced Domokos to the Doncaster Waspi Women who started having regular meetings at our Doncopolitan studio. We followed the story of Pam Johnson who became an activist when the government increased the state pension age, causing her to lose around £50,000 from her retirement fund. Then the unthinkable happened: a pandemic. Just after the prime minister’s address to the nation, Domokos called and asked me to start filming everything. He wouldn’t be able to travel, so we three women began using our phones to capture life as it unravelled. McGlone filmed working on the frontline in a care home, while still trying to advocate for her activism online. Johnson made scrubs for NHS staff, while expressing her anger and disillusionment at the government. The film is just 30 minutes, and it’s not enough. There is so much more to say about our lives. We are three female activists from different generations, grappling with a global pandemic, fighting for a better version of Britain than the one we’ve been given. There is so much more to tell about our town, patronised for too long. But it’s a start, and it’s an example of the richness of the stories we can tell when you let us speak in our own voice. Rachel Horne is a visual artist, writer and activist from Doncaster