Children central to charity’s ambitions
A charity supporting those experiencing domestic abuse in East Berkshire and South Buckinghamshire has released its strategic plan for the next two years.
The Dash Charity has presented Making A Dash For The Future, a strategic plan for 2024-2026 which sets out the charity’s direction of travel and informs its decisionmaking processes.
The plan, which looks to strengthen communities in the area to ‘feel safer and break the cycle of domestic abuse’, features four strategic priorities – stronger people, stronger spaces, stronger communities and stronger starts.
As part of its stronger people priority, the charity intends to undertake work, including continuing to provide therapeutic support online and faceto-face for those who are not in crisis, but are in the process of rebuilding their lives.
For its stronger spaces priority, the charity’s plans include ensuring that its IDVA and support worker services ‘empower people who stay in their homes (rather than move to a refuge), so they can feel safer’.
Under its stronger communities priority, the charity intends to carry out work including proactively engaging with new families and individuals who need support, whether this is at crisis point or if they are just looking to explore their options for the first time.
For stronger starts, plans include creating and funding a separate children’s services team to strengthen its offer for youngsters who are ‘directly impacted by domestic abuse’.
Nicola Miller, chief executive at The Dash Charity told the Advertiser: “Demand for children’s services has increased dramatically, as is the national picture, and so this is why stronger starts for children and young people is a strategic priority for the coming years.”
The charity will take a range of approaches to achieve its aim, including collaborative work, education, advocating, innovation through improvement of current practices, and consolidation through bringing together its teams with ‘cohesive practices and structures in place’.
Nicola, who stressed the importance that this is not seen as an ‘interim plan’, added: “Our two-year plan will serve as a roadmap for the next two years for the charity, and succeeds our previous strategy.
“It’s intentionally ambitious,
sets out our direction of travel and will inform our decisionmaking processes.
“We don’t expect to achieve all this overnight.
“There are action plans being put in place within our teams to deliver it.
“My primary aim is for us to be sitting here in 2026, ready to look at the future for the next two years and beyond, as we move closer to our vision: domestic abuse stops here.”
She explained that the charity has seen ‘consistently high levels of referrals’ being made over the last two years, ‘with some areas seeing bigger increases than others’.
“This reflects the reports of
domestic abuse to Thames Valley Police, which increased to 56,000 in the past year.
“Therefore, we will continue to use the data available and produced through our work to understand how those at greatest risk can access the support they need, and embed this in the programmes we develop,” Nicola said.
She added that much of the time will be spent looking inwards to make sure the charity has the ‘systems and processes in place’ to strengthen its people communities and spaces.
The full strategic plan can be viewed at tinyurl.com /4suk262a