#136 Why Are We Losing Our Women-Led Services?
RISE has been providing services for women who have been subjected to male violence across Brighton and east Sussex for decades. Yet, in the recent local retendering process they have lost three specific services to a generic, non-specialist (cheaper) service.
In this episode of the FiLiA podcast, Sally Jackson speaks to Jo Gough CEO of RISE Brighton, about the history of RISE, its impact on survivors, the council’s decision to cancel RISE’s contract, and what we can all do to help.
Listen here (Transcript below):
For more information read this blog by Rise Up! Campaigner & service user, Ali Ceesay.
Sign this petition to require local authorities to fund specific domestic abuse services for women.
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You can read an edited transcript of this podcast interview on The Morning Star here.
#136
Rise
Why are we losing our women-led services?
Sally Jackson from FiLiA in conversation with the Jo Gough CEO of Rise
Sally: So, hi, I'm Sally, one of the volunteers from FiLiA and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Jo Gough, who is the CEO of an organisation called Rise, who are working in Brighton and supporting those who experience a variety of crimes that come under this sort of violence against women agenda. It's really great to have you in to speak with you, Jo.
Perhaps we can start, because I'm aware that there’s a real diversity of services within Rise and what it offers, so tell us a little bit about maybe the history of Rise and the sort of services that have developed that have been available for those in Brighton.
Jo: I'll tell you a little bit about the history and then kind of bring you up to date. We say that Rise has been around for 26 years, it's actually been around longer than that so it was a more informal organisation of women-led organisation, grassroots, and we grew out of a women's centre actually in Brighton and Hove. So that was our home.
It was essentially a couple of women who felt really strongly that this was an issue, domestic violence and abuse as an issue that just wasn't being well held well supported in the city. They just kind of borrowed the space, borrowed a phone and did what they could and that's kind of the heart of the history of the organisation. A lot of the women that were at the start of the organisation, they're still around. And many of the people who, in fact, one of them wrote a lovely letter to the local paper about us just recently. So we've got a really strong history in Brighton and Hove, and we've also delivered across Sussex, in West Sussex previously and in East Sussex. In our time early on, we developed the helpline. And then we set up a refuge.
So they were the first two services that we've developed. We were actually originally called The Women's Refuge Project and being the hoarders that we are, we still find bits of memorabilia all over the place with Women's Refuge Project and the occasional longstanding policy that still has a reference to it in there.
So we were a women's refuge project. That was our roots. And that's how we grew.
We have always been women-led and we've always had women only boards. So out of the work we did with the refuge, not long after that, we also started to deliver a second refuge in West Sussex that we no longer have, one of our sister organisations in West Sussex took over that.
So we had two refuges for a while and a helpline. And then we started to grow our outreach services, our children and family’s services and at one point we had people across the whole of West Sussex and across the whole of Brighton and Hove in a variety of different places who worked in schools in local community centres, reaching a whole range of children and families.
What we began to realise, like many of the domestic abuse sector organisations, is we began to realise that we were fairly inward-looking and we were very careful around being confidential and ensuring that there was a safe and secure space for our services that really needed it to be safe and protected.
But we realised that some of the work we needed to do was in the community and we needed to have community involvement, community reach, and we needed people to understand that this is everybody's business. So we started to develop a new branding really in a new way of being as an organisation.
It was back in 2007 that we became Rise. We spent a couple of years thinking about what we needed to be and how we needed to be as an organisation. And we were very clear that we needed to have protected, safe parts of our service but we also needed to be there for the community and it actually enabled us to bring in new funding because people who didn't know about us knew, knew a bit more about us. We engaged a lot more volunteers, a lot more supporters in the city. And I think we were probably one of the pioneers in the domestic violence sector around bringing in extra support and fund because we've gone out to the community.
We then rebranded us as Rise and began to continue to develop our services. About 14 years ago we set up what we say is the first LGBT service in the country, but I understand there's an organisation in the Northeast who say they're the first too. So shall we say one of the first in the country, hugely proud of that because of where we're situated.
There is a big population of LGBT people. It's an LGBT friendly area. So we set up that service and began to offer a really supportive environment and group work and casework and along the way, while we were doing all this grassroots up, we started to get funding from the statutory sector, from health, from the council. And there were bits of money here and there and grants. And you can have a little bit more for this than a little bit more for that. And it just kind of slowly snowballed into a bigger service mainly very short term. You know, a year, six months funding.
And I remember when I joined Rise, I've been at Rise just over seven years, and I remember looking at some of the contracts and realising that we were doing way more work in some areas than the money would allow. In fact, our LGBT services with one of those, because it said you have to do all this. And it gave us like half the amount of money we needed to do that. So, that was then.
And then, again like other domestic violence services, things started to get a bit more formal, a bit more managerial, a bit more risk focused. It's all about risk. It's all about safety. It's all about stopping people being killed. Stopping women and children being killed in our case, LGBT people. So that's when all of the protocols came in around multi-agency committees, the MARAC some of your listeners may be aware of. The creation of the roles, the Independent Domestic Violence Advisor roles. And again, we were one of the first to take up projects that have those roles as well, trained up, qualified what are called IDVAs and developed IDVAs into to other areas like health and got all the accreditations, got all of the Women’s Aid accreditation and Safe Lives accreditation. And then obviously the funding was then linked to that. It was very much linked to the risk. So we went through that whole process.
After several years of doing that work, we realised that that had pulled us away from who we were as an organisation. And it had pulled us away from the focus of what organisations like Rise are here to do, the recovery, the therapy, we understood that many people would not feel able to report their crime. So they would never have a risk assessment to put them in that position.
Over the last couple of years, we've kind of reframed our thinking and, and try to focus very much on being the Rise we were.
Sally: It's really interesting. In some ways I think probably a fairly familiar story too, I'm just thinking of listeners that have worked in, in some aspect of, violence against women and girls, will have recognised that grassroots starting, women just saying we need to do something and getting together and getting on with it and doing it.
And then there's, as you said that sort of phase of, in inverted commas, professionalisation that occurred with all the suddenly it's all about risk in a way that positively, perhaps some research that enabled us to better understand what some risk factors were, but negatively pointing everything towards risk rather than women and needs and what support that they needed to be able to recover.
And then I think really bravely because it can be tempting and I've seen in other services, once you kind of get pulled into that process where you're going for bigger contracts, because local authorities or trusts are supporting you, to actually pull away a bit and say no we're going to make sure that we stick to our roots and we are going to do holistic care for women and not just short term, let's get you safe and stop me from being murdered in the next six weeks. Knowing very well that they might come back in six months’ time because you've not had time to do the longer term holistic work with those clients.
I'm thinking for Brighton; this is a service that generations now will have been aware of. And there will be children that grew up with their mothers in the refuge that now might be involved in some way with the services still.
So it's, it's really held in Brighton as a really important part of the structure of support services that were available.
Jo: I think that's absolutely true. The Christmas before last I was at work, I think it was Christmas Eve and we had a knock on our door, not on our refuge store, where our headquarters is, and we do client work there. Then we had to knock on the door and there was a woman and a young woman with her. And they explained that the daughter was adopted but she had lived in our refuge, and she'd bought a big box of gifts that she'd wrapped up for all the children for the refuge because she said, you know, I know what it was like I was there and I want to give something back. I’ve got a great life. I'm really happy now. And I just want to give something back. And we get that so often. So many people tell us stories of their experience of being there and even our staff, ex members of staff and board, we'll talk about things like, wearing the hard hat and the boots when we were building the new part of the refuge being there and overseeing all the design and the development of that so it's a really sad time because, you know, we didn't own our refuge, but we designed and developed that refuge. We didn't own all of the work that we did, but we designed and developed all of that. And that's now in other people's hands.
Sally: So, so tell us a little bit about what what's happened recently. And there's been, as in so many areas, a retendering of services and really quite a shocking result at the end of that tendering process.
Jo: So I suppose the first thing to say is, it was an absolute blow, but it wasn't a shock. I think we've been expecting something like this to happen for a good six years, six or seven years and we have been having conversations locally with the local commissioners. With that view in mind, we've been saying, and the politicians we've been saying this will happen if you take a procurement approach, competitive tendering approach, there was a very, very good chance that Rise will not succeed because the competition will likely be larger, better resourced, and will have expert tendering teams. And we were saying this we've secured a three to five-year tender in 2015, which started in October, 2015.
We were saying this before then, we were saying there's a good chance we might not get this. And we were actually as an organisation thinking about, do we want to go for it because we might not get it. And we did get it.
And the kind of contracts that we were required to bid for when we bid in 2015 was a One Front Door style. So we had to bid for something that had either one organisation leads in and delivering everything or a new coming governance arrangement for organisations, but it had to be one sign off of the contract or a lead in subcontracts. So we went into partnership and subcontracted, the rape crisis services to our local rape crisis, who were already delivering that service.
So it just seemed odd that we would have to subcontract when they were already delivering it. So we took the lead and the other partner was a non-specialist women led organisation, but they have been already delivering some of the services in East Sussex and we led on the contract and we still lead on that until the end of this month.
So that was like a large, huge contract. A lot of the money came in to Rise, and then we just pass it back over to the organisations that we subcontracted there. Then we had some oversight. This version was very different. It's split down into five lots. There's some information that I'm not allowed to talk about or share because of the confidentiality of the bidding process, but things like this, we're out in the public realm, so I can talk about that.
So the five separate lots were the Brighton and Hove community services, which is the first service mostly, but with a little bit of extra including, partner of perpetrators work.
The second lot was pretty much the same, but in East Sussex.
And then the third a lot was the sexual violence, rape and sexual violence service and that was across the whole of the Sussex.
And then the fourth was a stalking and harassment service.
And then the fifth was the Brighton and Hove refuge.
So we bid for three of those lots, lot 1,2 and 5. And we were unsuccessful with all of those. We were quite shocked to be unsuccessful with all of them. But as I say, not surprised to have lost because of, of the process.
I'll say little bit about the confidentiality of the process, actually. So, the procurement process, some people who are your listeners may know it is competitive. It is confidential. And it's a bit like when Richard Branson went for the Virgin trains and you're not allowed to set it up, so that you go into a price fixing or anything like that. All of those things apply exactly the same. So small grassroots run charity has to follow the same legal, competitive process that Richard Branson does. That's just to put it in context.
The advert went out across Europe. In my experience, you're not allowed to know who, who competes with you. You're not allowed to share the information. And in a previous role, I have known that one of the competition we had was an organisation in Amsterdam.
So it could be possible this year with the whole Brexit, it would have been normal and possible for competition to come from anywhere in the whole of Europe. So that in itself was really daunting. The minimum amounts of time that you're allowed to give in a formal, competitive process is 30 days, 30 actual days not working days.
And that's what we got. We got 30 days to complete the process and we had to submit bids to three lots and we don't have specialist tendering service. We don't have specialist legal advice. We've got a brilliant board and we have legal people on our board, but it’s not paid legal advice.
We then have to wait. So we expected to hear on the 21st of December, we actually heard on the 6th of January, which to add insult to injury was my daughter's birthday so 6th of January we found out and then we're required to wait a 10-day stand still period. In that time, we can challenge if we so wish. And that's 10 actual days again not working days.
So in that time, we obviously have to kind of think as an organisation, meet with our boards, think about, do we need to get legal advice? So that's, that's the reality of the experience that we had.
We did decide to challenge and we did submit a letter of challenge, which was not accepted.
The next stage would have been for us to take a legal action. And we would've had to have done that within 30 days of finding out there's a problem, basically. So, um, we then kind of refocused on ‘We've got to get the message out’ and we've got to do that in a trauma-informed way. The survivors we work with are going to be extremely upset to hear this news, the community, our ex clients, the people that might have just phoned our helpline and left a message on the machine. All of those people we were thinking about. So we decided to kind of slowly disseminate the information out and focus first and foremost on those in service with us at the time and communicating with them.
And then next, we went out to our valued partners because we knew that they would be working with our clients with us so they could help hold and support people as much as possible. And then eventually after periods of time, we went public with a very carefully worded, supportive statement.
And it was at that point on the 12th of February that it went public, it was picked up by our survivors. And literally within 24 hours, there was a petition online. We hadn’t even thought about it, how we had thought about, are we going to, what should we do? Should we mass campaign? And we didn't, we didn't have time. They were on it immediately.
And so the petition was set up and I remember I was watching the activity on Twitter over the weekends, and I knew how many signatures they would need to be heard at the council and I kept saying to my family, oh it’s got 500, it’s got a thousand. And it was just going up and up and up over the weekend, by the end of the weekend it had absolutely smashed the number they needed just to be heard at the council. And then over the following weeks, it just went up and up and up. And it's now 30,000 signatures. It's amazing. Which is absolutely amazing.
And on top of that, reading some of the things that people are saying, again, it's, people who have used our services. People have had friends and family that are used in our service. People that have been involved in the history and this kind of little, extra campaigns that seem to be popping up all over the place.
And it's just been hugely heartening to see that, to be honest. And meanwhile, we are basically transitioning our services to the new providers whilst we're also trying to plan for the future Rise, trying to secure funding, trying to retain staff that might be lost due to this process. some of them are core central staff because the projects help pay for things like HR and, you know, um, and some of them are frontline workers that just wouldn't be eligible for the TUPE process. so we're working really hard on that whilst also continuing to have conversations with the local authority and the commissioners around new funding opportunities. It couldn't be a worse time really.
In terms of our sector with the Domestic Abuse Bill coming in, COVID related stuff going on. We knew that there had been massive change because the Domestic Abuse Bill, we knew there'd be new money coming. We've known that for quite a while. We've known that since before the commission started and obviously COVID is been going on for a year, and the impact of that is just huge.
So it's really difficult, it's a really difficult time, but we've been hugely heartened by the support that really kind of endorsed our work, you sit around doing your job thinking I'm doing a good job. I think this organisation is good.
I think people want us here doing this but then when you see the amount of activism that has grown out of this situation, it really, really endorses. I've got brilliant, brilliant people in my staff team. Not one of them would we want to let go. We're hugely proud of their work and we know they'll continue to do it.
Those of them that are TUPE over to the new services and you know, that those new service providers will be will have the best people they really will. But we also know that some of those are already going elsewhere because they're choosing not to. They don't want to work in a non-specialist organisation.
They want to work in a specialist sector organisation.
Sally: I think, I think, you know, there's so many important things that you've brought up there. A couple of things that really strike me is the difference in being an organisation that has a specialism in writing bids and tenders and an organisation that has a specialism in trauma focused recovery work with women and which is the one that you would want to be supporting someone you cared about if they were escaping violence it's just a no brainer.
But obviously we're talking about decisions being made around pound signs rather than care here and that's where the priority is. And just thinking of your staff as well.
If you've learned this work through the women's sector and it's so much more than just work when you're in the women's sector, because there is that ethos of this service and women supporting women and women watching other women grow and develop as a result of the work that they're doing. And you're not going to get that inner generic service.
So I completely understand I'm sure your staff want to continue to support women. To be doing that in the confines of a very generic organisation that doesn't understand that ethos would be almost impossible for so many, because it would just sort of go against their own personal standards of how to be supporting.
Jo: Yeah. And it's really difficult because you think about the opportunities that are afforded to them, possibly, with working for a bigger organisation or a national organisation, they may have opportunities for progression, but in those larger organisations, you're more likely to see inequalities of gender pay parity and those kinds of things, because they're bigger organisations, they're more business-like and so, on the one hand, they've got more opportunities for progression, but on the other hand, those kind of forces, those pressures that come in larger organisations that are more pressure on women, are not there in an organisation like Rise.
I'm thinking about just hearing what you were saying. I was thinking about some of the projects and organisations that have kind of grown out of Rise and thinking about our history and where we grew out of.
We grew out of the women's sector with the other women's organisations. There's a brilliant Oasis project, which is a women's centred, women-led, drug and alcohol service. We came up together, the rape crisis, again, we came up together and for us, the stalking harassment service for justice grew out of Rise.
We provided some of that early kind of support and consultancy to help them grow into the organisation that they are now very strong and capable. And also, several of our staff have set up like new projects to specialise. We've got a specialist in child to adult violence that we were funded probably about eight years ago to do a Europe wide research project and our main work for that has just set up a separate organisation to focus on that, which we're co-working with. We have a member of staff that has a community base project, The Rita project. And we're about to partner with them because they basically just go out and create conversations around domestic violence and abuse.
And that was her passion. And we've, now got an opportunity to do some co-working with her.
Thinking all that about that kind of emergence and growth. And whilst we might not have the hierarchy to progress people up in the same way, the opportunities we have for people to grow and to be part of the centre of the organisation and to influence it and the democracy in the organisation as well.
We are a hierarchical organisation. We're not a collective, we're not an old women's feminist collective, but we are feminist in root. I am a feminist. Feminism is at our core and we do try to take a consensus, a collective approach, and feed up from our communities up from our staff in a way that’s more difficult in a large organisation, it becomes more bean counting and less face to face.
I'm really lucky. I've worked the senior manager and now as the CEO and actually from my point of view, the reason that I came to Rise is because I wanted to work for a feminist organisation because I wanted to work for women-led organisation and the then CEO, who I'm going to namecheck Gail Grey was just an absolute Shero. And I was impressed with her. I was impressed with the organisation and I just looked for an opportunity to work for Rise. And many of our staff tell that story. They say I've been waiting to try and get a job at Rise. I wanted to work for Rise. I wanted to work for an organisation that was women centred, and I wanted to be able to utilize my feminism in a positive way. Not just provide casework for people, but to change the system, to tackle and change the system. It's not just about picking up the phone and doing the casework, it’s what are we going to do? Community focus is one of our strategic aims.
We're not just about ‘let's do this high-level risk work’ It's not about that. It's much bigger than that. It's family-wide. It's community-wide, it's everybody's business. It's on everybody's street, in everybody's neighbourhood and we all have to tackle it. And the best way to tackle that is by women for women.
Sally: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, eventually to end it, again, looking at that, recognising that systemic practice and systemic nature of abuse against women, and it's not just working with individual women to support them. Although of course that's important, but it's actually about looking at those systems of oppression, which enable violence against women to continue.
I wonder, you've mentioned a couple of things, talked about the petition, but what can we do, what would be helpful to you?
There's two levels I'm thinking of how can we help Rise? What could we do specifically for your organisation, but also really being aware that unfortunately it's not just Rise this is happening to.
We see a specialist services around the country as well. So for the women listening, what can we do? What's a call to action that we can help in some way?
Jo: Okay. So the first thing I'm going to be very Rise selfish. First of all, www.Rise.org.uk. If you can please donate and help us do our work, we have benefited from generous donations over the last year or so from people who believe in us and what we do, we would welcome anybody that wishes to do that.
I think on a bigger picture level, again, it's a really good opportunity right now. There has been, at the national level, a splitting of strategy. So there was a Violence Against Women and Girl’s Strategy that included domestic violence in it.
That went out of date and actually that strategy was really helpful around commissioning and procurement as well. Because it had some guidance on commissioning and procurement. And it did allow the possibility of not procuring competitively in it. So that is now out of date and not in place, but there's consultation happening on the VAWG Strategy at the moment. It's reopened in light of the recent outpouring of grief and anger concerning the Sarah Everard case and the recent vigil. So the VAWG Strategy consultation is there. Please, please do comment on it if you've experienced domestic violence or abuse, or if you're connected to it or you care about it. And I think one of the biggest things we would say for Rise and for the whole of the sector is that domestic violence has to be seen as part of the VAWG agenda. It cannot be fragmented. We now have in our area a fragmented approach to the work and, it cannot be fragmented. The impact of domestic violence in the context of migrant women in the context of so-called honour based violence, even sexual violence in the context of domestic violence, you can't separate them. Street-based harassment, you can't separate these things and it will not make sense if it is separated and it will leave people in danger.
I think it's really important that people understand that and that we kind of lobby really hard as people who care about women and women's issues. And as feminists, we're all about Rise’s mission is freedom from domestic abuse. So it's liberation, it's freedom. That's what we're here to do. And sometimes people say to me, well, that's a big ask, you know, how are you going to achieve that? Well, there's no point in Rise existing unless we want that to be achieved and we have to be able to influence at a national level, change government thinking and policy, and filter that down at a local level.
And of course there’s a petition it may not be open for much longer and there's a petition at a national level from Women's Aid, which is about this subject, about ensuring that there is a women-led services. So if you can also sign that petition, that would be great.
Sally: And I know it's been difficult and you mentioned the vigil, and I know there was a brilliant collection of women sharing and showing the petition in a safe, socially distant COVID compliant way and as we're coming out of lockdown as well, it makes me think we need to be loud about this.
It scares me that we've got to a situation where generic companies are winning contracts to support women who've experienced violence and we're not recognising the importance of those women only services and women led services. So, it's time to be loud and to shout and to make sure people realise really lifesaving, but also life enhancing services that need to be provided by women with the skills and knowledge and experience to deliver that care.
Jo: Definitely. I think that it's definitely a time to protest. Incidentally one of those women did have a visit from a police officer afterwards. We have similar issues here. I think it's time to protest. I wrote a little blog on our website on International Women's Day. I hadn't even told our comms people, I was doing it and so they had to kind of shoehorn it in really quickly.
Because I just felt really strongly that I've spent many in International Women's Day, sending my love to my women friends and suggesting books to read from women authors, then encouraging people to celebrate women in their lives and women in politics and all of that kind of thing. And I just thought, I'm just not doing that this year. I'm not doing it because actually I'm quite angry. I'm quite annoyed. I'm fed up really of the platitudes and International Women's Day was born out of protest. And I think we've got a lot to protest for, that, after all these years, for some organisations like Rise, they've been doing this for forty years and how far have we come? That there's no less women being killed on a weekly basis.
One every three days is being killed. There has been some improvements with reporting. There's not a great deal of improvement in the criminal justice system. And support for therapy and recovery, it's austerity and all of that. And I don't really want to celebrate.
Unless this is all resolved I’ll probably never celebrates again on International Women's Day. So all my women friends will think I'm a right grump.
Sally: I'm sure they'll forgive you, all the brilliant work that you've done at Rise and with your team, Jo, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. Thanks so much for spending time with us.