One25 can now confirm that both our current drop-in and Peony service will close by the end of May.
Our outreach and casework services for women involved in street sex work will continue. One25’s Pause programmes will continue to run whilst funding is in place.
We know how vital our support is for the women that we exist for. Reducing One25’s services will impact the women and we are extremely sad about this. The services that we will continue to deliver will provide support to the largest number of women possible within our current resources. We expect this to be around 200 women next year compared with 234 last year.
We are very sad that we will be saying goodbye to valued members of our dedicated staff and volunteer team.
One25 is facing significant financial challenges as many others are. We have been working hard to grow our income, but this has been extremely challenging in the current climate. In order to ensure that One25 continues to operate, we now have to substantially reduce our costs.
We returned to our vision and mission and recognised we need to focus on reaching the most marginalised women and supporting them to be safe. We looked at the needs of the women using our services, and the impact of each of the services we deliver. We also considered where there may be some elements of duplication of our work through partners too.
This showed us that the outreach service for women who are street sex-working in Bristol is the most critical of all One25’s services. We also then saw that the casework service was essential to both continue operating the van and to ensure that these women could get the further support that they need. We assessed what back-office support was needed to enable these two services to run, and when we costed this up, we could see that this was all we could afford to continue at this time.
We are still working on this and recognise that we will not be able to find ways to cover everything. However, we do have some good news to share at this stage. Since our original announcement, we have been working with partners to explore ways forward. We are really pleased to be exploring options around how we may work with BrisDoc to be able to continue access to healthcare within the drop-in space. We are currently consulting with the women to shape what this could look like and hope to be able to confirm plans for this in May.
We are hopeful about the future. Our income generation strategy focuses on the positive steps we can take to grow income both in the short and longer-term.
We have a strong track record and a wealth of experience supporting highly marginalised women, as well as a dedicated and caring supporter base. These changes will allow One25 to continue to be here. But we will not be able to navigate this alone.
Your understanding and ongoing support, the work of our partners, the dedication of staff, volunteers and all of our supporters is as important as it has ever been.
Please continue to journey with us. Thank you.
