The power of community
The need for what we do at Ella’s is vast and growing, and we’re committed to providing the best support for as many women as we can. For this reason, we’ve taken some time over the last year to evaluate what we do and look at how we can strengthen our impact among survivors of trafficking and exploitation.
As a result, based on feedback from the women we work with as well as our frontline staff, we’ve made a few changes to the way we work. One of these changes is the introduction of our new Community and Resettlement Service, co-ordinated by Alex who joined us this Summer.
Safer Together
Community is crucial at every stage of our support for women who’ve survived trafficking and exploitation. In the early days of their recovery, the community at Ella’s is where survivors learn to trust people again, and build new, safe relationships. Later, as they start to move towards an independent future, community is vital for women to stay safe and free. Now we have Alex to concentrate on this side of our work, it gives our other support workers more time to focus on the more intensive one-to-one support needed by survivors in the first few months of their recovery.
‘Everyone wants to feel connected to their community and have opportunities to build skills and relationships with others, but for a survivor this can be an overwhelming prospect,’ says Alex.
‘The Community and Resettlement service is key to ensuring survivors can continue their move to independence.’
‘Helping women build community ensures that they have the confidence and connections to integrate into society. It means they can build their own strong support networks that go way beyond Ella’s’ work.’
Alex coordinates Ella’s’ in-house community activities as well as supporting women to branch out and make their own connections, and she has made a strong start. She organised a Caribbean cookery workshop with Made in Hackney to mark Black History Month, and put on a perfect end-of-summer beach trip which did everyone the world of good!
Alex has also started to recruit and train more volunteer befrienders, to provide survivors with an extra source of support in the latter months of their time at Ella’s. (You can find out more about this volunteer opportunity on this web page.)
Investing in the future
The Community and Resettlement Service is just one of the developments we’ve made in the last year to make our work with survivors as excellent as it can be. In addition, we’ve refined our theory of change and added more structure around the support we provide for women. We’ve also implemented a new monitoring and evaluation process to track women’s recovery, meaning we can tailor our support effectively as well as evidence our impact.
Huge thanks go to our long-term supporting partner, TRIBE Freedom Foundation, for providing a grant to cover the resources to evaluate our work, put new plans and processes in place and move forward as an organisation.
These are significant developments for us as we look to grow and expand our impact among survivors, and we know they will lead to more lives changed.
To everyone supporting us along the way, thank you for joining us to help unlock freedom.
For more on this last year at Ella’s, read our Impact Report 2020/21.
Left to right: a cookery workshop with a local community group; a lovely beach trip; huge thanks to the wonderful TRIBE for helping to make this possible.