Freedom Personal Safety Community Interest Company

Freedom Personal Safey has had a fantastic year delivering a wide range of projects and programmes of activity. Primarily delivery has been face to face, though the option to hold additional online sessions has been taken up by some clients. We are pleased to report that our income has been generated both from grant-funded projects and from provision of services to businesses that want to provide personal safety training to their staff as part of their corporate responsibility offer. This has meant an almost 50/50 split in where our income has come from and allows us to feel slightly more stable in our pipeline of income than if we were reliant on grant-funding alone In total we have delivered programmes and workshops to 3987 participants, a significant uplift from last year. The approximate gender make-up of this is 75% women and 25% men. This is a higher proportion of women to men than last year though this is explained by one of our grant-funded projects this year exclusively working with women. Additionally, of these participants, 198 were either teachers or community related professionals who we trained with a view to them passing on their training to others, so increasing our reach. Grant Funded Projects We completed grant funding awards from Kirklees Council’s Safe and Inclusive Communities Fund to deliver our Empowered, Strong and Resilient programme and West Yorkshire Safer Communities Women’s Safety Matter project. We have continued to work on our Postcode Foundation funded project focused on the areas of Gorton and Bolton and this project will continue on until the end of 2025. Additionally we have secured funding from the Greater Manchester Violence Reduction Unit through the Gorse Hill Alliance, and West Yorkshire Mayor’s Safer Communities grant round 7 to deliver additional projects into next year. We continue to have a strong working relationship with the University of Huddersfield and Kirklees College who have continued to support our work by commissioning more sessions for their staff and networks. We have also developed new relationships with other businesses and an NHS Trust. We continue to try and improve the way that we record impact. As with all prevention work, it is difficult to measure the impact you have had in stopping something happening in the first place. We do however, collate and review feedback from the workshops and programmes we deliver and have had 3 direct disclosures made following sessions across the year. Feedback is overwhelmingly positive and we use it to develop our services accordingly.