As the coronavirus crisis continues to affect the lives of everyone in the country, our understanding of the impact and how it has played in domestic abuse grows. At the end of last week, we reviewed our numbers for the month and discovered that we have reached a sobering 140% increase in demand for our service in comparison to this time last year.
The experience driven from previous years is that these numbers should slow down in the lead up to Christmas and then increase in January. This startling increase reminds us that the pressures being put on people’s lives are having an increasing effect on those in domestic abuse relationships. We acknowledge that the coming winter is going to be a difficult one and it has the protentional to put an even bigger strain to our service than we even saw earlier this year.
As the demand increases, we need to continue to adapt and grow our ability to meet that. We as a charity recognise the need to continue to adapt and change the way our service is accessed to ensure that we can meet this demand. One of those ways is improving mobile compatibility with our website as well as making it more accessible to other languages. To accomplish that goal, we need financial support to grow.
So for that reason, we are very excited to announce that we have been awarded £10,000 from the Vital for Berkshire – Coronavirus Fund from the Berkshire Community Foundation. The support of the Berkshire Community Foundation is critical to enable our charity to do the amazing work we are doing.
We are so grateful for this support and look forward to sharing more positive fundraising news.
