Our friends at The National Lottery have delivered a huge boost to our work with the most vulnerable women we see

We have received some wonderful and far-reaching news from The National Lottery.

A generous supporter of The New Futures Project over the years, it has just awarded us £614,000 from its Reaching Communities Fund.

Put simply, this money will put us in a more financially stable position and ensure our life-changing work with our most vulnerable clients can continue.

It will fund our work with two particular groups – women involved in sex work and young people aged 18 to 25 who are at risk of sexual exploitation. The funding will cover us for the next four years.

It is difficult to overstate how crucial this area of what we do has been and will continue to be for these clients.

The stories these women and young people tell us are horrifying.

We are doing everything in our power to help them turn their lives around and to live free of abuse, exploitation and social exclusion.

Our director Della Kagure Brown said: “Lots of funders give us money to continue our work and we are always grateful for their support, but this is different.

“It is a huge gift they have given us and we are immensely grateful for that. It will help this project grow and develop and become fully sustainable.”

The project has supported approximately 12,000 women and girls in the past 20-plus years, Della said.

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

“So many are vulnerable to further abuse through violent relationships and sex work. As well as sexual abuse and exploitation, they also tell us of their experiences of poverty, homelessness and despair.

“Some deal with their trauma by ‘self-medicating’ with alcohol or drugs. A frightening number of the women the project has got to know and has helped over the years have died.

“Every woman we are able to support as a result of this award is a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a mother or a friend.

“We will carry on doing everything in our power to help them and, thanks to the National Lottery, we can do that with greater confidence.”

In total, The National Lottery has granted awards of approximately £1.8 million to the project in the past 20 years.

National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK.

Thanks to them, last year (2023/24) The National Lottery Community Fund awarded over half a billion pounds (£686.3 million) of life-changing funding to communities across the UK, supporting more than 13,700 projects to turn their great ideas into reality.

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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