Survivors West Yorkshire (SWY) is a survivor led and focused service. Its vision is to support evidenced based services that are gender informed and accessible across West Yorkshire. Services which are user friendly and proactively involve survivors.
Our aim is to create a specialist service that connects survivors and their supporters to professional services using good practice standards. Our focus is on cloud based support offering off-line options if appropriate for the survivor.
Our objective is to innovatively support the self-empowerment of adult survivors of sexual violence- abuse by developing robustly evaluated psychological interventions.
Self – help knowledge and social action involvement platforms allow survivors to become a supported collective expert resource to support policy and service improvements. This is underpinned by partnership working to create collective impacts.
Historically (2002 -2016) we operated as an unincorporated charity (none registered). The decision to register as a CIO was taken to allow us to meet the aims of the charity more effectively during a period of increasing survivor support service demand, combined with improving government awareness around the issues presented by sexual violence abuse across society.
Survivors West Yorkshire's main focus is on providing support for male survivors through the Ben's Place programme, for whom there is, regionally and nationally, a far less diverse and prolific support offer than there is for female survivors.
We currently offer:
This year we have put in place the structures to enable us to provide 2 new services:
Virtual support systems have been shown to provide great benefits for complex trauma populations: users report enjoying the ease of access and experience significant positive outcomes. Online support systems have the added benefit of sustainability and efficiency - once set up, they require minimal maintenance.
In addition to Ben’s Place Programme we also provide self-help resources and work in collaboration with other organisations in the West Yorkshire area to ensure people receive support that is right for them.
