‘The culmination of a dream’ – director Della on our new counselling training course

On the evening of Wednesday 8th November 2023, a dream came true.

The New Futures Project is a local charity supporting women who have experienced sexual trauma, abuse or exploitation. 

Like many small local charities, we have been dependent on charitable trusts to fund our work.

Over the 23 years the project has been in existence, we have been fortunate to have been supported by national and local funders such as the National Lottery, Children in Need, the Samworth Foundation – all of whom have been generous with their support and encouragement.

However, our aim for many years has been to make the charity more sustainable by finding a way to fund our work through generated income. 

Our earliest attempts had limited success but in 2019, we came up with a plan to deliver professional counselling training from the project. 

The staff team worked together to develop the basic idea and discussed how we could make it work.

We applied for funding from the Lloyds Foundation to help us research and develop a business plan and we started to believe we could do it. 

Then Covid struck. The project struggled to meet the demand for its  services and plans for the training development were put on hold.

Following Covid there was such an increased demand for counselling, the project developed a counselling service and now runs a service with approximately forty volunteers offering counselling from the suite of rooms at the project or remotely online.

We were able to reconsider how we could deliver professional training, recognising that as well as providing the project with an income stream, this would ensure we had a team of counsellors who would be able to deliver counselling sessions from the project as part of their professional training, a ‘home grown’ service with counsellors who would receive specialist professional training to work with the women we support.

We approached the Counselling and Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body, (CPCAB), who helped us develop the course and provided professional accreditation and recruited the most amazing tutor, Nick Roth to become our Counselling Training Manager and advertised our first Level 2 course.

Our Counselling Training Manager, Nick

During open days we talked to potential learners about the project and the work it does and explained that by training with us, their fees would be supporting the charity’s work.

After a few minor hiccups, finally on Wednesday, November 8th we waited nervously to see if we had succeeded, and by 6pm all of the learners who had signed up to the course had arrived!

After giving a brief welcome speech, I sat in my office and tearfully rang all the people who had contributed to our success to thank them for their help.

It is early days, but this really is the culmination of a dream.

It is a huge achievement for a small local charity with a small staff team and we are very proud of what we have been able to develop. 

This is the first of many courses we have planned and eventually we hope the income generated will make the charity sustainable and able to support local women for many more years.

If you are interested in counselling training and at the same time supporting a local women’s charity then please contact us for details of our future courses.

New Futures was set up more than 20 years ago to support women involved in sex work.

However, we have evolved into a welfare and counselling service for women and young people dealing with sexual abuse or exploitation – frequently involving 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.