As 2021 draws to a close we wanted to take the time to reflect on our year here at Basis. It’s been another difficult year facing a lot of uncertainty with the ever changing Covid restrictions, and we’re incredibly proud of the way our team has dealt with this year. In light of this, we wanted to take the time to reflect on 2021 and shine a light on some of our achievements.
We’ve worked with women and young people to advocate for their right to be safely housed with good access to health care, offering them emotional support and encouragement in regular phone calls and home visits. We’ve all worked hard to end the stigma and judgement they so often face which can stop them accessing the support they need.
Our year in numbers
We’ve done some number crunching to give you an idea of what our Basis Yorkshire Women’s Team and Young People’s Team gets up to throughout the year…
We recruited 3 additional staff members including a new post for working with Housing and DV, an Adult Exploitation worker, and IDVA and a YP Education and Early Intervention Worker
Our adult team are currently supporting 59 women with intensive support around health, housing, substance use and safety and many more on an ad-hoc basis when needed
Our young people’s team are supporting 38 young people
Supported 9 women to start transitioning into training, volunteering or employment
We’ve done 166 hours of drop-ins
We’ve done 84 evening outreach sessions
We’ve given out 283 servings of hot food or drinks
We’ve provided 53 phones to help keep people connected to the services they need
We’ve held 214 educational sessions with 85 different young people – that’s 681 hours of educational sessions
We’ve delivered 165 hours of training to professionals
Memorable moments
We’re finally able to reopen our drop-in, every Monday Tuesday and Wednesday from 1 to 4 our doors were open to women in Leeds who sex work or are sexually exploited.
Drop-in is a chance for women to enjoy a meal, some snacks or a hot drink. There are clothes to browse, sofas for relaxing if a quiet moment is needed and arts and crafts activities. Drop-in is also a great opportunity for us to help women out with any issues they have, we can help women out with benefits or housing or provide support if they come to us in crisis. It was great to be able to get this service up and running again and allow is to provide this lifeline to the women we support.
We ran two important campaigns on our social media. #CEAHasntGoneAway and #17DaysofAction.
You can check out the #CESHasntGoneAway campaign here, and on our Young People’s team social media which you can find here: @basis_yp | @basisyoungpeople | @BasisYoungPeople
You can check out our #17DaysofAction campaign here, and on our Basis Sex Work twitter and Basis Yorkshire Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin: @BasisSexWork | @basisyorkshire | @BasisYorkshire1 | Basis Yorkshire
We were able to purchase a new van thanks to a phenomenal fundraiser set up by one of our supporters. It’s fitted with a toilet, a microwave, heating, comfortable seats and storage space. This will see us through for many years to come, and will massively improve the support that we can provide when on our evening outreach.
The Young Person’s team delivered an inspiring and thought-provoking conference on Improving Responses to Child Exploitation and launched their new services reflecting the changes they saw needed to happen. Their new service offer expands the service to offer support to young people who have experienced all forms of Child Sexual Abuse, offers post-abuse support to Young people also provides early intervention in Schools across the Leeds district.
Towards the end of the year we were over the moon to have received two awards: The Homeless Link Excellence Award (People First) and the ‘Award for Excellence’ alongside our partners across Leeds for our multi-agency partner working with street outreach work.
Our wonderful supporters
We wouldn’t be able to do the work that we do without the help of our wonderful supporters. Donations on our Amazon Wishlist have meant we’ve been able to provide more people with essentials such as toiletries, underwear and food. We also received generous clothes donations throughout the year meaning that our supply of clothes could stay well stocked – this is so important, especially if a woman has to start from scratch after fleeing domestic violence, needs new clothes after an assault, or can’t afford to buy clothes ready for the changing seasons.
Our end of year Just Giving pages have raised over £200 so far and are still going:
Basis Adult Team Fundraiser Basis Young People Fundraiser
Thank you to our team, our volunteers, our trustees, our funders and everyone else who has supported us this year.
Your support has allowed us to provide invaluable support to women and young people across Leeds.
Looking forward to 2022, our New Years resolution is to keep on doing the best we can to support the women and young people we work with. We will continue to advocate for those we support and challenge stigma, discrimination or inappropriate language when we come across it.