History of Her Centre:
Her Centre has always been a women’s advice and advocacy service providing training and one to one support to women, since we began in 1997. Mainly providing training and support groups for women in our early days, we were in Hare Street off Powis St. In 2008, after funding cuts, there were only 4 posts, but we developed a new and now have 13 staff.
Based in Clockhouse Community Centre, Her Centre mainly works with women experiencing abuse, offering both support to high-risk referrals and 3 weekly drop-in sessions for women experiencing abuse. We have provided the Greenwich Domestic Violence Advocacy service since 2011, with renewed funding every 4 years, and currently receive over 1200 referrals each year.
We developed our support group in 2010 and our basic English classes for women in 2014. Both services are still run by trained volunteers and have good attendance. We purchase individual counselling from Deborah Ubee Trust and have done since 2017, giving women in depth 6-month trauma counselling. We have partnered with Little Fish Theatre since 2013 to provide services on healthy relationships to teenagers and continue this successful partnership.
We had 5-year funding for a Black and Minority Ethnic and Refugee (BAMER) Development post, in 2013, which provided women from different immigrant communities classes in confidence building, parenting skills, and job-related courses such as Food and Hygiene, Child Care, and Health and Safety. When this funding ended, we continued to engage women from new communities through our women’s social group and now have community champions from different countries of origin who meet regularly to plan events on health, money management and other key issues and ensure these are advertised in their communities. We also continue to run our open forum events, which started in 2009, themed on issues that impact women but open to anyone interested to attend. These are now run 3 times a year, in June, October and March. Our March event for International Women’s Day always has a good turnout of 80 to 100 attendees.
Our work continues to reflects our values of listening and respecting the women we work with and working as a team to meet their needs.
January 2025