We are a specialist charity that supports women of African Caribbean heritage. One of the main obstacles we have found over the years is being to to successfully rehouse our service users into adequate temporary accommodation when fleeing danger.
Whether it is their essential needs not being catered to in their care packages (with products they can’t use/not made for them), being refused a space for themselves or their children, or even racism faced whilst at the refuge. Often, we had found that we had to use personal funds to book hotels, simply to ensure our service users are not on the street.
After years of campaigning, we are so happy to say that your help has allowed us to take the first monumental step to rectify this issue by acquiring what will be the first of its kind, the UK's first Refuge for Women of African and Caribbean heritage. However, we now need your help to ensure that we can run this refuge safely and adequately to best be able to cater for service users.
We have received an overwhelming amount of support and queries on how you can help with the Sistah Space Sanctuary, so we have detailed a list below of things that these donations will permit us to do to run a successful and safe refuge.
- Renovation of the building
- Security Measures
- Furniture
- Staffing & operational costs
- Utilities (Gas, electric & water)
- Essential items (Hygiene products)
- Culturally considered essential items (I.e. Skin & hair products)
The money raised will enable us to deliver a safe and culturally considered service. Though this is a huge step in the right direction, this is still only one refuge. Sistah Space still plans on engaging with the relevant agencies and refuges where possible, however, the Sanctuary now allows us the ability to safely place service users into a culturally considered temporary home whilst we work to find them somewhere more suitable and stable.
The Sanctuary will be utilised as a means to solve the issues black women face when fleeing abuse as having a safe space is a crucial step in the rehabilitation progress of our service users.
