New partnership supports women facing multiple challenges in N Warwickshire
P3 have partnered with women’s peer support organisation Cohort 4, to offer somewhere safe to stay for women who are facing multiple challenges in their lives.
P3’s Places to Stay Warwickshire service will provide both shared and single accommodation for women in North Warwickshire, with Cohort 4 providing individual and group support.
Support for women, led by women
Cohort 4 was founded as a different kind of organisation: peer-led, community-based support for women who have experienced multiple forms of social exclusion such as abuse, mental ill-health and the criminal justice system.
Led by women who have backgrounds in public service and who are also survivors themselves, support can range from mentoring and skills development to evening WhatsApp groups, which can be a lifeline for women experiencing mental health difficulties like loneliness or anxiety.
Founding Director Beverley Gilbert, said:
“There are around one million women in the UK with multiple and complex needs. Cohort 4 provides a longer-term, holistic service for women in our home area who have been left at the margins of society and part of this is being able to provide support where women need it, in safe, supported accommodation. That’s where the partnership with P3 comes in.
“We’ve just been able to offer a safe place to call home for a woman who has been granted unsupervised contact with her daughter - P3 have helped us to give her that opportunity.”
A safe place to call home
As well as accommodation, P3 delivers several different services across the county, including street outreach for people who are homeless, and preventative housing support to enable people to manage their own tenancies and live independently.
P3’s Head of Services for Warwickshire, Esther Barrett, said:
“We are incredibly excited to begin our partnership with Cohort 4 to offer supported housing for women who have been through challenging circumstances in North Warwickshire.
"We have known about the great support offered to women by Cohort 4 for quite some time now, and we know they share our values of being led by the people we support and working alongside people to achieve the goals they set for themselves. We are delighted that they took us up on the offer to work together!”
