Thank you for making it happen

We’re hugely grateful to you, our grant funders and donors, for the financial support you provide that enables us to journey alongside women involved in selling sex to their chosen futures. Alongside this many of you support our collaborative research and training, influenced by those with lived experience, that works towards ensuring no women is compelled to sell sex, to eliminate ‘survival sex’, and to remove all barriers preventing access to vital services. It is simple, your commitment to stand with us, matters and we’d like to say a BIG thank you again!

You make a difference daily to the lives of women we work with and without your support it couldn’t happen. We can ensure that women have food and basic essentials; that a women sees a trusted face on the street at 1am in the morning; that women living with trauma are in secure housing, are not vulnerable on the street or at risk in inappropriate accommodation;  that women have a safe space to talk and process feelings to a trained and compassionate Women’s Support Worker; that women can access appropriate mental and physical health provision; that women can access benefits, so they are not compelled to sell sex for their rent, utilities or other essentials; so women can thrive, not just survive.

We’d also love to recognise the important often unsung work that goes on beyond the vital financial support. So many of our funders and donors carry out other acts of kindness that makes a huge difference to our relatively small organisation and staff team. This can be through introducing us to others with the expertise that we need; sharing our research and raising awareness within your networks; introducing our charity to an organisation or community group who may want to support us; or something as simple but critical like sharing our social media posts and blogs. This all creates the change we need to see, to meet our above aims, as it starts with creating the ‘will’ in communities to drive it.

Over the next year we’re going to be looking at better ways to support individuals and groups who want to raise awareness or funds for us. We’ll be launching extra resources and information in the coming months. We’ll be reaching out to some of you soon with a short donor survey and we hope you’ll be able to lead on the changes we should make. In the meantime, it would be great to hear your stories about the best experiences you’ve had when fundraising for a charity and then we’ll aim to emulate them!

Once again a BIG thank you for standing with us!

From the whole Beyond the Streets Team