Project Overview
Safety4Sisters was established in Manchester in 2009 to address the exclusion of migrant women (particularly those with 'no recourse to public funds') from the most basic rights of safety and protection. They work towards this through their policy work - highlighting strategies and practices that exclude migrant women from protection within statutory and voluntary provision; through educating and challenging organisations and the public to uphold the human rights of migrant women - and bearing witness and documenting where this does not happen; and through the creation of spaces for sisterhood in which the individual stories of migrant women - their experiences of disempowerment and struggle for survival - are transformed into collective stories and collective action.
The Safety First! Project will amplify, promote and sustain the voices, concerns and narratives of migrant women who have experienced gender based violence, homelessness, displacement and have no recourse to public funds (NRPF).
Led by and for black and minoritised women, the project will facilitate a coordinated grassroots response to address the structural inequalities and multiple imposed barriers NRPF women who have experienced violence and abuse face. By consulting with, promoting and being led by the voices of women with lived experience, the project will platform the narratives of survivors whose voices are excluded from the homelessness conversation and who have no routes of access to safe accommodation.
The project will also network grassroots led by and for black feminist women’s organisations whose work has always retained a focus on the rights of migrant women survivors’ rights.