Bradford Women's Aid provides support, assistance and accommodation to women and children experiencing domestic abuse. They are run by women for women.

Background to Bradford Women's Aid

Bradford Women's Aid was established by a community group of feminist activists in 1985 to provide short term refuge accommodation for women and children experiencing domestic abuse and continued to provide that service for many years. As a result of growing awareness about domestic abuse and its devastating effect on the lives of women and children, more funding became available to services supporting women and children affected by domestic abuse and they were in a position to develop new Outreach and Resettlement services. Set up in 1998 and 2002 respectively their Outreach service provides community based support for women experiencing domestic abuse who needed interventions other than refuge and their Resettlement service provides support to women and children moving out of refuge (or other temporary accommodation) into their own tenancies. 

In 2015 Bradford Women’s Aid went through further significant development to become the contract holder for women’s refuge and resettlement provision with Bradford Council and since April 2016 Bradford Women’s Aid is the provider of 24 refuge spaces and 48 resettlement spaces for women experiencing domestic abuse. They have four refuges, two in Bradford (including one BME refuge) and two in Keighley. 

Following the closure of the Blenheim Project in 2015 they transferred a Big Lottery Fund grant to Bradford Women’s Aid so that they could set up a new children’s service. This service started in April 2016 to provide services for the children whose mothers are clients of the floating support service affected by domestic abuse and homelessness. 

Bradford Women’s Aid, always mindful of the equalities issues affecting their clients provide Asian workers who speak Urdu/Punjabi, an Eastern European worker and an LGBT Women’s Support worker. 

Vision: 

For Bradford Women's Aid to be recognised as a leading organisation supporting and enabling women and children experiencing domestic abuse. 

Mission: 

To contribute to the eradication of abuse toward women and children. 

Aims:

• -To remain financially viable and sustainable.
• -To have a flexible responsive organisational infrastructure which reflects and supports the enabling ethos of the organisation.
• -To ensure innovative, proactive high quality service provision driven by service user involvement.
• -To recruit and retain high preformance and values driven staff inspired and empowered by the feminist ethos of the organisation.
• -To be part of a strong strategic partnership working locally and regionally.
• -To have facilities which appropriately reflect the requirements and needs of the service users the staff and the organisation as a whole.
• -To have comprehensive information with both external and internal gathering mechanisms to make effective decisions.

Values:

A feminist ethos - they share the view that in their society women (and girls) are viewed as less than equal to men and that violence and abuse against women (and girls) is perpetuated by this system. 

Equality, Diversity and Fair Access
Bradford Women's Aid is committed to striving for fair access, diversity and inclusion in the provision of its services and the employment of the staff, volunteers and management committee members who provide these services and contribute to the organisation.

Compassion and respect - for all those that they come into contact with at work : service users, staff, trustees, volunteers, students, and those from other agencies. 

Service user led - this means they will ensure that their services are provided to meet the needs expressed by their service users and that they will consult widely and appropriately to gain feedback about their services and about any proposed changes or developments to their services. 

Ethical - they will be aware of ethics in their work, use ethical companies and work within their environmental policy. Inclusivity and anti-oppressive practice- they will monitor staff, board members, volunteers and service users to make sure their services are offered to all and all staff will undertake training in anti-oppressive practice so that they can effectively challenge oppressive behavior. 

Quality of service - they undertake to evidence this through meeting requirements of quality assurance initiatives such as Investors in People, PQASSO and Quality Assurance Framework (Supporting People). 

Empowerment -  provide assistance to their service users so they can develop the skills and confidence to do things for themselves and become independent. 

Professional integrity - They ensure that they are aware of what constitutes professional behavior and they work within professional boundaries at all times.