A year in the Life of The New Futures Project: We look back on 2024 (Part one – January to June)

We’ve decided to take detailed look back at 2024 – which has been another big year in the history of the New Futures Project. 

It was momentous for all kinds of reasons. We have received good news and we have received bad news.

A month-by-month review is also a chance to hear again from the women we have supported and to restate our views on the major issues which affect their lives.

We are proud of what we do here, so we will keep shouting about it.

In January we published the first instalment of a new feature we are rather proud of – it’s a monthly column called Karen’s Journal.

Karen – not her real name – is a long-time friend and a former client.  We asked her if she would like to write regularly for us about her life, its highs and lows and her previous experience of coming here for support during her most difficult times.

Karen, who is in her 40s and in poor but improving health as a result of her history of alcohol and drug use, agreed to do it and the idea evolved into  Karen’s Journal.

Counselling is becoming a more significant part of what we do as each month passes.

In the course of the year we’ve spoken to a number of women and young people who have come to us for support.

One, Trisha – not her real name – spoke of the progress she has made since she began receiving counselling here to address the trauma she was living with as a result of her history of domestic abuse.

She told us: “When I first started coming here I’d lost everything, I had PTSD and I was having nightmares. I had no self-esteem or confidence.

“It wasn’t until I had my eyes opened to the abuse I’d suffered that I realised it wasn’t right. Abuse is not normal.”

In February, we talked to Gracie – also not her real name – who spoke  with great honesty about the experiences which brought her to us.

In her case, growing up in an abusive family had left her shorn of all confidence and self-esteem.

She told us: “My life is so different now. I can talk to people, whereas before I could hardly lift my head and look people in the eye due to my crippling social anxiety.

“Now I can have conversations, even with people I don’t know. I was never like that before.

“I remember laughing for what seemed like the first time in years and thinking that it sounded so weird.

“The people at the New Futures Project made me feel welcome straight away.

“It’s the genuine kindness and caring attitude of the people at New Futures. They truly want to help.”

In March, we revealed we were working on the most ambitious fund-raising effort in our history. It was called the Big Business Appeal.

We planned to write to just shy of 200 of the biggest businesses in the city and wider county to ask them to think of ways – literally, any ways – they could support us.

In her message to those companies, our director Della Kagure Brown wrote: “In the 24 years I’ve managed the New Futures Project we’ve worked with probably 12,000 women.

“That’s 12,000 women who have been raped, abused and exploited – as children, young people or adults, recently or in the past.

“You will have a connection to some of the women the project has helped over the past 24 years and will continue to help in the years ahead.

“Please help us to help them. Be a part of the change that needs to happen”

The invitation still stands.

So many of the women and young people we support here at The New Futures Project are living with the trauma of sexual assault.

And, in a significant number of those cases, they were victims of ‘spiking’ – most commonly, the illicit addition of alcohol or drugs to a person’s drink or food in order to confuse or incapacitate them.

However, in recent years a number of people have reported being injected with unknown substances which caused  disorientation or unconsciousness.

Leicestershire Police launched a campaign to shine a light on spiking while also ensuring people working in pubs, clubs and other establishments across the city and county knew what they need to do if a customer believed they have been targeted.

In April, we were delighted to learn that a major European funding body had agreed to help us safeguard women and young people from sexual exploitation.

The award of approximately 45,000 Euros was from the King Baudouin Foundation, a Belgian organisation which is dedicated to tackling disadvantage wherever it exists.

The housing crisis in this country has many faces – not least of them the damp and mouldy conditions so many people are expected to tolerate.

We see and hear the consequences of the mess we’re in every single day in the stories we hear from the women and young people we support.

In fact, the photograph above was taken in the home – rented from a private landlord – of a woman we are helping.

Whether they live in the private or social housing, many of them tell us their health, both physical and mental, is being put at risk by the unacceptable state of their homes.

Carl Martin, our direct services manager, said: “We know from the face-to face work we do with our clients that many are in poor housing situations, with urgent work required to make their homes safe places to live in.

“Often these conditions are contributing and worsening people’s physical and mental health.”

In May we were delighted to announce we’d had the builders in to create three more counselling rooms as well as new office space in our previously under-used basement.

The new counselling rooms supplemented the four we had already. Each is decorated and furnished in bright, welcoming colours.

Our director Della said at the time: “We are thrilled with the recent additions to the building.

“We have three more counselling rooms which means an extra 100 women a week can receive counselling which will improve their lives.

We also addressed a subject we know all too much about – the homelessness crisis.

We spoke out after a report suggested official rough-sleeping statistics were greatly underestimating the true scale of homelessness among women up and down the country.

The project, called The London Women’s Rough Sleeping Census, established that women find ways to avoid bedding down outdoors and instead seek safe shelter in locations including A&E waiting rooms, buses or trains, squats, friends’ or strangers’ homes. 

Some simply walk the streets all night and grab what sleep they can during the day.

We routinely see evidence of this practice among women we support.

Our Big Business Appeal finally came to fruition this month, with our information packs going to potential donors across the city and county, including our neighbours here in London Road and surrounding streets.

Those packs – which contained a letter from our director, our history, some facts and figures and, crucially, the stories of two of our counselling clients – Gracie and Trisha .

We’re very fortunate to enjoy support for our work from a broad range of sources.

However, we’d like to do much more for the 700-plus women and young people we see every year – hence our decision to launch the most ambitious fundraising drive in our history.

In June we launched another regular feature we are very proud of. It’s called The Names on the Doors.

When women come to us for counselling we take them to one of seven bright and cosy rooms  where they can talk in peace and comfort.

As they walk through the door they might notice a nameplate.

These commemorate women who turned to us for help through the most difficult times in their lives before dying tragically young.

We thought it would be fitting to tell their stories, where possible with the help of those who knew them best.

We began with Emma’s story, which was told by her partner,  Karen – the pseudonym we have given to a client who began keeping a diary last year and is sharing it with us every month or so.

Also in June, we responded to a police report which set out to establish the scale of abuse in England and Wales.

Police believe there are as many as four million predatory offenders across the two countries who pose a serious risk to women and children, according to a report prepared for senior officers.

Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said the figure, uncovered by research carried out for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, revealed a culture of violence against women and girls and an urgent need for concerted action.

Sir Mark insisted the problem could not be solved by police forces and criminal justice agencies alone, according to a report in The Guardian.

In response, our Della said: “I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist specialising in working with trauma and I personally carry out more than 10 assessments a week for our project, around 500 clients a year.

“All of these women and young  people have a life story which involves physical or sexual violence from a male perpetrator.

“I am not at all surprised by the figures quoted by Sir Mark Rowley and I doubt very much that anyone working with women and children will be.

“On behalf of our charity and the women I work with I would like to thank him for acknowledging the scale of this problem and I hope as a society we can come together to find a solution.”

We are immensely proud of our record of helping the next generation of social workers prepare for life on the frontline.

We do this by offering placements to social work students from universities in Leicester and further afield, enabling dozens of undergraduates to spend between 70 and 100 days here at the project, directly helping the women we support.

Each is placed under the supervision of a qualified social worker and is responsible for a caseload of up to 12 women or young people, giving them invaluable real-life work experience before they resume their studies or graduate.

The students say being confronted with the realities of the women’s lives – including the corrosive effects of homelessness, debt, substance use, mental ill-health, sexual abuse, domestic violence or sex work – has a profound effect on them and gives them an invaluable insight into the profession.

Lauren Cooke, who is about to complete her BA Social Work degree at De Montfort University, said her time with us was has been enormously beneficial, not to mention challenging and eye-opening.  

In fact, one of the women 21-year-old Lauren worked with closely in her time here has decided to write this tribute to her and the project.

We are always looking for ways to improve and expand the counselling we offer here to keep pace with the growing demand for our services.

One of the ways we hope to do just that is by offering low-cost therapy sessions not here in our home in London Road, but exclusively online and for a small fee.

We believe a number of those who are seeking our help would benefit from this arrangement and would be able to pay for that support on a sliding scale for each hourly session.

Our director Della said: “We offer counselling as part of our wrap-round support for women who are in crisis or who have experienced sexual abuse or exploitation.

“They receive free counselling and this will remain the case.

“However, we are also receiving lots of requests for counselling from people who are not necessarily in crisis but who feel they need our support.

“As a result, we are in the process of developing a low-cost online counselling service.

“This is part of our long-term plan to increase earned income for the charity which supports our eventual aim of becoming self-sustainable.”

Of course, the first half of the year ended with the General Election.

In the run-up to the big day, members of staff and clients named the areas they wanted the new administration to focus on.

We said ministers must act rapidly and meaningfully on the great injustices of our time – not least the shameful failure to guarantee decent housing and timely health and social care to all.

Then, there’s the deepening poverty crisis and enduring gaps in the provision of help for those experiencing mental ill-health.

All of these things touch the lives of the women and young people who turn to The New Futures Project in their hundreds every year.

The New Futures Project offers a comprehensive welfare and counselling service for women and young people dealing with sexual abuse or exploitation, domestic violence, trafficking, poverty and debt, substance use or mental ill-health.

Call us on 0116 251 0803 or send us a message at: info@new-futures.org.uk

You can find us at 71 London Road, Leicester, LE2 0PE.

We publish a monthly newsletter to tell the stories of the women we support and to round up all the things we’ve been doing. 

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