A women’s counselling centre will match all public donations from 8 to 15 March in collaboration with the Big Give Match Fund.
The Big Give is the leading online fund-matching platform, and this year its campaign focuses on matching donations for charities focused on helping women and girls.
The Maya Centre is hoping to raise £25,000, which the Big Give Match Fund would then double to £50,000, enabling them to help 50 more vulnerable women through long term counselling programmes.
Currently, the Maya Centre provides 100 women a year with a 12–24-week programme of counselling and the hope is to increase their capacity to 150 women.
Named after famous author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, the centre was established in 1984 and is a community-based charity in Islington providing free mental health and wellbeing services to women on low incomes.
Emma Brech, the Maya Centre’s CEO, explained that in the last six months the centre has seen a 53% increase in referrals for counselling and that they currently cannot meet that demand.
“The rise in domestic violence and killings of women have really highlighted how much more we need to do about women’s mental health and wellbeing,” said Brech. “We work with women who have experienced trauma and as more women talk openly, it is staggering the number of women who have had experiences of abuse of violence. We know that there are not adequate services for women, and we need to raise the profile of the need for specialist women services.”
Covid-19 has amplified issues of domestic abuse and violence against women, with many becoming more isolated due to the pandemic, and therefore increasingly at risk.
“We need to go out proactively and find those hidden women. We recognise that as everything moved online, there are women who are further and further away from finding us,” Brech explains.
“We provide a free, intercultural, inclusive approach. We are a centre for all women and then we break that down into what makes particular women feel safer. For example, we have a black women’s therapy group and Somali group. We offer counselling in 14 different languages.”
In addition to the Big Give campaign, the centre was recently awarded funding from the National Lottery Community Fund to create and develop a Women’s Hub from April 2022. Granted £360,000 to spend across three years, the money will help the centre create partnerships with smaller organisations in Islington and extend their reach to women in the community.
Currently they are piloting workshops with Hopscotch Women’s Centre. Brech explained that “it’s about taking our in-depth counselling approach and then making it more accessible by turning it into educational workshops and going to different organisations.”
Community Navigators will also be used to deliver a series of intercultural peer-support groups, wellbeing workshops and to set up a Women’s Forum (an advisory group to the Maya Centre Board of Trustees).
The centre launched a new website and is aiming to raise its profile and increase engagement. They are also encouraging donations over the next week with a series of Instagram lives taking place this Friday, Sunday and Monday.
Visit the link here to make a donation.
