Pressure on for charity trying to maintain quality of service

Founded in 1984, the project provides supported accommodation for women aged 16 to 25, who are survivors of sexual abuse or violence. While referrals are going up, their income has been steadily eroded in recent years.

This year has been the worst, with the charity losing large chunks of its income from its main sources of funding.

Project manager Jo Meagher said: “Everybody is in the same boat so they are all applying to the big trusts at the same time, there’s lots of competition.”

After losing a member of staff last year, and some staff working fewer hours, management decided against making people go through the trauma of further restructuring and instead use money from reserves to tide them over.

“Come next March we are going to have to look at reducing staff again,” said Ms Meagher.

“I think there are quite a few specialist services in Sheffield who feel they are going to be undercut by non-specialist projects, which are cheap and cheerful.

“We try to do group work and one-to-ones and offer a variety of educational opportunities and these sorts of things we have just had to slim down, because we haven’t got enough money to pay the staff to do the volume of the work. Our clients tend to be quite young, their needs are very complex, and we want to give them a really good level of support for a decent amount of time.

“By all accounts we have a good reputation and we have really positive outcomes for clients.

“Because of that we are very motivated to keeping the project going. We are putting a lot of energy into trying to secure other funds, working with other projects to do joint bids, but ultimately we are a service provider – we want to spend time providing services, not applying for money.”