At 3SC we were delighted to hear that Together Women had secured Ministry of Justice funding.

Together Women provide holistic services to women and girls with multiple and complex issues across Yorkshire, Humberside and the North West of England. Their Women’s Centres located in Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Sheffield and HMP New Hall, offer safe, women-only spaces where key workers and seasonal staff undertake a needs assessment, action-planning and provide support and case management for women referred by a number of different agencies.

Together Women recently announced that they have been successful in securing funds from the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) to support female offenders in communities across West Yorkshire. This is a sizeable pot of money to deliver a specialist integrated domestic abuse, housing and support service to enhance the key worker support and provision currently in place. It includes: Independent Domestic Violence Advocate Provision; an Accommodation Fund for a bond scheme to enable women in urgent need of accommodation to be suitably housed in private rented housing and/or pay any rent arrears to avoid the women being made homeless; and a counselling and therapeutic support where women with identified needs around mental health, domestic and physical abuse will have access to trauma informed counselling in the community across West Yorkshire.

3SC manage the Together Women services delivered for West Yorkshire  and Humberside, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). 3SC contract manage their service provision to ensure the CRCs and MOJ requirements are being delivered and meet the needs of service users and to ensure that contractual obligations are met. 3SC has worked closely with Together Women to support them to streamline their internal processes to enhance service delivery, increase capacity and ensure a consistent approach across their provision in relation to  collating and recording data. In addition, 3SC have worked with Together Women to raise their profile across the CRCs which in turn has seen an increase in referrals.

3SC’s Contract Performance Manager, Kate Murray, has been responsible for managing the West Yorkshire Together Women contracts for the last few years. She said “Together Woman are passionate about supporting women throughout their journey in the criminal justice system. Working alongside them to implement and embed processes to improve effectiveness of service delivery and compliance with the quality assurance framework has been a positive experience for both parties and they have been very enthusiastic about implementing new ways of working to ensure continuous improvement to the services they offer to ensure women receive the best possible support.”