The Mission of LBWP is committed to securing the highest level of quality services towards protecting, promoting and developing the rights and resources of women, children and families from BME communities.

LBWP achieves its mission by addressing violence against women and girls providing advice, guidance, support, advocacy and accommodation under a framework of empowerment and self- sustainability, by influencing and affecting change in government policy and, by providing a safe environment.

LBWP was Newham Asian Women’s Project. Then they became London Black Women’s Project.

On 25 November 2015, the day designated by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – the Management Committee of the organisation then known as Newham Asian Women’s Project (NAWP) agreed by consensus to change the name to London Black Women’s Project (LBWP).

The organisation, under the new name, was officially launched on 8 March 2016 – International Women’s Day. The new name reflects the following conditions of organisation: representation, commitment to dedicated and specialist support and identity.

LBWP diversified the group of women and girls to whom it provides services from being a single group specialist organisation for South Asian women and girls to including all black minority ethnic and refugee women and girls.

LBWP expanded its’ provision to all black women and girls to meet unmet demand for specialist and dedicated services and to share knowledge, expertise and its unique perspective as a gendered, anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist organisation focused around the aims of social justice and social change.

In practice this means that LBWP works towards reconstructing social relationships in ways that promote zero tolerance, non-violence and equality and justice for all women and girls. BME women and girls in particular face specific barriers that deny these fulfilments that are guaranteed under human rights.

LBWP is a dedicated and specialist VAWG HP (harmful practices) organisation that continues to be sustainable during a time when many BME specialist VAWG organisations have been forced into closure due to cuts in funding and mergers across the VAWG sector with bigger and generic organisations. Such mergers have subsequently challenged black feminist identity and agency to organise under a human rights-based framework. If it were not for surviving BME organisations such as LBWP to continue its’ commitment to support the ideals of black feminism and to protect dedicated and specialist support services LBWP would face erasure in this country.

For LBWP it is important to identify and define the problem of violence against women and girls as gendered and as such LBWP defines violence against women and girls as per the following: Article 1 of the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVW), proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in its resolution 48/104 of 20 December 1993, which defines the term ‘violence against women’ as ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private.’