South Yorkshire Women's Aid was set up in January 2017 off of a small council grant of £30,000. It replaced 'Doncaster Women's Aid' which closed down due to lack of funds in March 2016, but a group of campaigners fought to keep it open and won.

Now we're back to last year again, fighting to save our service because the council have told us they will offer us no further funding past December this year.

South Yorkshire Women's Aid (SYWA)is a small but vital service, with three part time staff it supports weekly, sometimes multiple daily referrals, mostly from the council's own agencies. SYWA provide therapeutic advice and support to women and girls who are going through or have been through domestic violence and abuse. Specialist services like ours are needed to keep women safe and help women rebuild their lives. Women's aid's were fought for 50 years ago by women for women. Now these services are being eroded. In the period that there was no women's aid in Doncaster last year there were over 6,600 reported incidents of domestic violence. And that's just the ones the police knew about. We know there are lots of incidents that go unreported.

There is no question about it, we are a needed, vital service, not only in Doncaster but in the UK. The nature of domestic violence means women have to flee to different parts of the country to escape abuse. The loss of South Yorkshire Women's Aid will be an injury to women and girls everywhere.

Despite this, the council still will not fund us and so without any secure funding stream SYWA's future is uncertain. The council say we need to find alternative funding streams, but its hard to obtain substantial pots of funding from organisations when you have no other funder - having some council funding is a ticket to larger pots of money from other providers.

2 women a week die at the hands of a violent partner or ex-partner - a further 3 women a week commit suicide to escape abuse. Women who are gong through domestic violence need specialist services, they deserve specialist services.

After a previous heroic 'just giving' campaign we managed to raise enough to stay open until December 2017, as the council did not give us money for rent for our office as promised. But now we need to raise money to ensure we can continue to keep our doors open for as long as possible into 2018 to buy us time to get larger pots of funding.

We know it is Tory implemented austerity that leads to cuts to services like ours, but we also know that Doncaster Labour council are implementing that austerity. We do not accept that there is no money in society to fund our service.

A member of staff at SYWA has already attended a funeral of a client who took her life because she lost contact with us when we closed last year. We cannot let this happen again. We will fight for our service and fight for more sustainable funding, but in the meantime we need your help to buy us time.

In solidarity,

The 'women's lives matter' campaign on behalf of SYWA