About
Our team brings together practitioners from across the violence against women and girls sector, from advocacy and safeguarding to research and specialist family court reports. We are an accredited training provider and consultancy, led by and for Black and racialised women.
We believe that living free from oppression is a fundamental human right, for every person and for every survivor, and that a life should be lived in openness rather than shaped by fear, exclusion and harm. We approach our work, and ourselves, from a Black and intersectional feminist perspective, which runs through every service we offer, every practice we teach and every interaction we have. Our mission is to provide warm, Black feminist care that helps you heal and thrive, to change the systems that stand in the way of that freedom, and to inspire others to come on this journey with us.
Known publicly as our anti-oppressive principles, these seven were worked out through the Black Feminist Lab and set down in our praxis document. They run through every service we offer, every practice we teach and every interaction we have.
Approaches that seek power are not justice-driven, and this is justice work, so what we seek is equity. We want to know where power is operating in every room, every service and every relationship, so that it is never unannounced and never able to hide. Power seeks to hide, and when it hides, it harms, so we name it wherever we find it, including in ourselves.
Racism is a root cause of the harm we work against, so anti-racism cannot sit in a module or a values statement. It is part of what it means to be competent in this work.
Care is infrastructure, something the organisation provides, rather than a benefit or a test of individual resilience. If the conditions of the work are harmful, the answer is to change the conditions.
Healing is political work, and the people doing it are often healing themselves. We make room for the whole person, practitioner and survivor, and we respect routes to healing the system does not count.
Hope is a political act. We teach what better would look like, and we make the demand as well as the recommendation.
The point is to disrupt the systems that produce the harm, rather than to make them more comfortable. Improvement that leaves the design intact is a delay.
Survivors and practitioners draw their strength from community, and isolation is what abuse relies on. We build collective power, work in coalition, and credit and pay for the expertise we draw on.
The principles depend on four claims: oppression is interlocking rather than additive; intersectionality is a structural analysis rather than a list of identities; violence is produced by conditions; and the state is not a neutral resource.
Everything we have built has grown from the Sister Support Groups we ran because they were needed, and each year since has added something that practitioners and survivors asked us for.
Founded in Coventry. Peer-led Sister Support Groups begin, unfunded and run because they were needed.
We begin writing specialist reports for the family court, bringing an intersectional, anti-oppressive lens to the experiences of survivors.
OCN London accredited IIDSVA training begins, the first and only Black and Black mixed-heritage led provider. National Lottery funds the first Hope and Healing workshops, run every year since.
Dear Sister begins with National Lottery funding. Don’t Call Me Sis launches, and The Anatomy of Adultification is delivered to local authorities and schools across the country.
400+ professionals trained across the country. OPCC-funded needs assessment research with racialised survivors. The Friedom Framework and the Intersectional Risk Tracker Tool (IRTT) are created, and the IRTT is endorsed by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Office.
The ISVA and IDVA modules are combined into the IIDSVA programme, on the advice of the practitioners who took it.
Frieda becomes a training academy: Frieda’s Hub opens for practitioners, the Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-Based Violence and Abuse (DASH) Companion launches, Healing Movements begins with Pulse Pilates, and the e-learning platform is on its way.
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