I’ve been working here at One25 over the last five years in the role of operations manager. Prior to that for ten years I worked in homelessness services in Bristol.
One of the things I love about working at One25 is how inspired I feel working with these teams, these women, the volunteers…
And us genuinely loving the women, delighting in them and having the privilege of walking alongside them
As the new CEO, here are five things that I’m very excited about!
Our outreach van has been going out for seven nights a week in the last five months. It’s been amazing to reach out to the women every night of the week with the van and I’m really hopeful that that will become a permanent part of our services.
So we’re expanding our Pause services to also cover the areas of South Gloucestershire and North Somerset in addition to our Bristol Pause service. We’ll be reaching out to women in those areas who have had children removed from their care and helping them to recover from their experiences and preventing further pregnancies and removals.
So we have an aim here at One25 to look at our diversity and to look at how we are good at diversity and inclusion in the workplace, making sure that we are representative of the women. And making sure that we create a culture where everybody has a voice.
Our new partnership with the Changing Futures programme where we will have a One25 worker who will work with ten women across the two years who experience abuse and who are not currently engaged with any support from any services.
Changing Futures will work here in Bristol with 60 people over the next two years who experience multiple disadvantage. And that includes 20 women who’ve experienced abuse. The programme will also identify areas of best practice around trauma-informed approaches and really dig down into why those approaches work.
So we want to think about the next step from Peony. Peony is a very successful service: we have seen more women getting employment – we want to think about what would help women sustain employment opportunities. So that would include things like trauma-informed, supported work placements where employers are aware of the women’s experiences and are able to support them to sustain their work.
We need to identify potential partnerships where we can offer work placement opportunities for women whilst we still provide the support that they need to maintain that employment and gain financial and emotional independence.
