Working Together Conference 2024
Autumnal leaves and a crisp air against a backdrop of the monumental building that is the Muslim Heritage Centre.
This must signal our annual Working Together conference which took place on the 6 November 2024.
Throughout the year, we have service user-led groups – Working Together, Reach Voices, that meet regularly to feedback to the trustees and staff so we can make important asks of the agencies we work in collaboration with relating to these areas: housing, health and wellbeing, work and skills and justice.
Staff, service users, volunteers and trustees get together and have important conversations and, as we recognise that we can only do this if we have the buy in from external organisations, we invite them to come and listen and contribute too.
This year, we were joined by representatives of the Growth Company, GM Police, Manchester City Council, NHS and a marketing agency called Agent.
We also heard important testimonies from service users and situations of extreme violence and coercive control with common themes emerging of gaslighting, threats, rape, trauma, apologies and the cycle of abuse starting again. Our service users are real people with families, interests, jobs, and have to deal with awful threats until they get the help they deserve.
This help is often not linear, with delays in help for housing, immigration and poor communication by various agencies that don’t always work well in conjunction together.
Our role in this Working Together conference and its wider work, is to map this and be a real mirror to these agencies and reflect back on areas of improvement.
A Women’s Aid/ResPublica report stated that for every pound invested in the VAWG sector, there would be a saving of £9 to the public purse (NHS, housing, etc). And yet, we are a chronically underfunded sector.
We had tables of discussion, and the ‘Justice’ table fed back that they want the criminal justice system to have better communication with survivors and a more joined approach between the police, NHS and social services. They also want these sectors to invest in education and training for the police to better treat survivors of domestic abuse as the victims’ experience can be riddled by errors of judgment due to lack of knowledge, lack of staff, government’s underinvestment in public sector workers – police, etc.
Perpetrators can sometimes game the system learning how to manipulate the police so better training to recognise what might be happening is necessary.
The work and skills table fed back that it would be important for employers to offer flexibility to mums that having fled domestic violence, now find themselves in the workplace with adjustments for part-time work to be able to look after children more effectively or simply to understand their trauma and make reasonable adjustments on a case-by-case basis and with their holistic needs in mind.
The health and wellbeing panel fed back that Manchester Women’s Aid has various health projects with extremely good feedback for IRIS – a model that works with GPs, healthcare workers and receptionists to recognise domestic abuse in health settings when women attending appointments.
Service users also said that wellbeing activities such as writing and cooking sessions at the Reach and Respite Rooms drop-ins reintroduce them to doing activities in the community and improve self-confidence. They said that gym passes and being able to bring their dogs to residential care would mean they could do more activities, as some depend on their dog for emotional safety and getting out.
A special thanks to the trustees for their attendance too – we know our service users appreciate talking to you directly about their hopes for joined-up working which protects survivors and improves outcomes, and for lasting change.
