Gender Equality United Kingdom Project #55556

Stand with Us Fund

by Rosa Fund

Project Report | Jul 9, 2026
Stand With Us Fund

By Graziella Terracciano | Partnerships Manager

Stand With Us Fund (SWU) addresses male violence against women and girls (VAWG) by investing in frontline organisations. Originally started with money raised by Reclaim the Streets following the appalling murder of Sarah Everard by a service police officer, Stand With Us exists to make the UK a safer place for all women and girls through: organisational development grants of up to £25k and free-to-access training and networking opportunities.

SWU is the only fund offering organisational development grants to the network of small, frontline, women-led VAWG organisations working across the UK. SWU supports the UK Government’s ambition to halve VAWG in the next decade.

Thanks to your support, Stand With Us has distributed £1.1 million through 48 grants, reaching 25k+ women and girls and strengthening the network of critical frontline VAWG organisations, UK-wide.

STAND WITH US 2

Stand With Us 2, which distributed over £500k in grants to 23 organisations in 2025, is now complete and undergoing an external evaluation, to help us gather evidence of impact and to understand where improvements to the fund can be made. We look forward to sharing the impact report that will be published later this year.

STAND WITH US 3

We were pleased to open our third round of Stand With Us from 12 May to 22 June 2026.

With the round now closed, we have begun the assessment process, which includes preliminary eligibility checks and shortlisting by our team, full assessments by our freelance assessors, and the final selection of organisations by a grants panel comprised of sector leaders and experts and at least two Rosa Trustees.

We aim to distribute a minimum of £500k to women-led VAWG organisations working across the UK to support women and girls impacted by male violence. Stand With Us 3 grantholding organisations will be announced in November 2026, with projects starting in January 27.

CASE STUDY

Adapted from a presentation by Miriam Ahmed, CEO of SWU2 grantholder organisation Amina - The Muslim Women’s Resource Centre (MWRC) Note: Amira is not her real name.

Amira came to the UK on a spousal visa. Eight years after her visa expired, her husband was still promising to renew it - a promise he never kept. Without valid immigration status, she had no safe way to leave.

From 6am until 11pm, Amira's day belonged to everyone but herself. Tea and breakfast had to be made before each family member woke. Lunch had to be timed to her husband's return. Her sister-in-law arrived for dinner each evening with her children, meaning Amira routinely cooked for nine people. Her only break was a short daily walk, permitted because of her high blood pressure. At 11pm, she massaged her mother-in-law's feet. Seventeen hours of labour, every day.

This was coercive control, systematically imposed and collectively enforced by an entire household. Every member of the family was complicit in Amira's abuse.

Amira's experience is not unique. Many women are abused by multiple perpetrators, yet our legal definitions, our services and our training are not designed to recognise this. When one woman went to the police they said: "We can charge your husband, but everything to do with your in-laws is muddy water."

For women like Amira, Amina - the Muslim Women's Resource Centre - is there to help, providing: one-to-one confidential support from a specialist advocacy caseworker to help women navigate their next steps; immigration and legal advice to understand their rights and options; access to a helpline and befriending services to connect with other women who share their experience; and employability and financial support to help them build a new life, and more...

If we are truly committed to ending violence against women and girls, we must understand who the perpetrators are, and ensure our response reflects women's actual lives. This means raising awareness with services such as the police, legal professionals and the courts, immigration and social services (where children are involved), making sure abuse like that experienced by Amira can be recognised and addressed.

With Rosa’s support, Amina – the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre was able to start building the evidence needed to shine a light extended family abuse, and produced the report Sabr, Silence and Struggles: Extended family abuse in Muslim and BME Communities in Scotland, that aims to change how services understand and respond to this critical .

Watch Miriam Ahmed’s full talk about the work of Amina MWRC at Rosa’s annual conference 2026 here.

Thank you for supporting Rosa's Stand With Us Fund. None of this would have been possible without you.

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Mar 12, 2026
Stand With Us Fund

By Graziella Terracciano | Partnerships Manager

Stand With Us Fund (SWU) addresses male violence against women and girls (VAWG) by investing in frontline organisations. Originally started with money raised by Reclaim the Streets following the appalling murder of Sarah Everard by a service police officer. Stand With Us exists to make the UK a safer place for all women and girls through: organisational development grants of up to £25k and free-to-access training and networking opportunities.

SWU is the only fund offering organisational development grants to the network of small, frontline, women-led VAWG organisations working across the UK. It supports the UK Government’s ambition to halve VAWG in the next decade.

Thanks to your support, Stand With Us has distributed £1.1 million through 48 grants, reaching 25k+ women and girls and strengthening the network of critical frontline VAWG organisations, UK-wide.

STAND WITH US - ROUND 2

In December 2025, we were pleased to announce the distribution of £537,322 in grants to 23 organisations through our second round of Stand With Us.

Alongside grants of up to £25k, organisations received access to a free, high-quality programme of networking and training opportunities, helping them build community, capacity and skills in areas including governance, social media, fundraising, safeguarding, finance and leadership.

See the announcement here.

The second round of Stand With Us is now entering its final phase. With funded projects now complete, and final grant holder reports collated, programme evaluation is now underway. This will culminate in an impact report that will be published later this year. We look forward to sharing our findings for this work.

STAND WITH US - ROUND 3

As the funding crisis for women-led VAWG organisations continues, we are preparing to open a third round of Stand With Us this spring. Pending funding, our aim is to distribute a minimum of 25 grants in the autumn of 2026.

As with all Rosa’s programmes, Stand With Us is co-produced with the sector. Sector leaders and women with lived experience will drive the fund's design, assessment and delivery. In this way, we will ensure the fund continues to meet the most immediate needs of frontline VAWG organisations working UK-wide.

Following is evidence of the impact of Stand With Us by one of its grantholders...

STORY OF IMPACT

RASASH Founded in 2014, Rape and Sexual Abuse Service Highland (RASASH) supports anyone over the age of 13 across Scotland’s Highland Council area affected by sexual violence. As the only rape crisis centre in a region the size of Belgium, RASASH offers confidential, survivor-led support tailored to the needs of rural communities facing isolation, financial hardship, and caring responsibilities.In 2022, it received a Stand With Us grant from Rosa, which helped expand its reach and impact. The funding enabled digital training for staff, recruitment of support line volunteers, and a website upgrade to communicate its services to a wider audience. It also strengthened its support for LGBTQ+ survivors and hired an in-house fundraiser to boost donations.

CEO Romy Rehfeld says, “All of our support services are led by survivors.” Following these improvements, RASASH saw an 8% rise in referrals. Romy says, “I believe that our visibility and community engagement thanks to this grant have contributed to that.”

.......

Thank you for supporting Rosa's Stand With Us Fund. None of this would have been possible without you.

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Nov 13, 2025
Stand With Us Fund

By Graziella Terracciano | Partnerships Manager

The Stand With Us fund (SWU) addresses the critical lack of investment in frontline organisations supporting women and girls who experience male violence in the UK. Originally set up using money raised by Reclaim the Streets in the wake of the appalling kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in 2021, SWU supports individual organisations to become stronger and more sustainable, and strengthens the network of violence against women and girls (VAWG) organisations working across the UK through:

Organisational development grants of up to £25,000 for up to 12 months, funding areas including strategy, governance, leadership, alliance building, fundraising, systems and processes.
A high-quality programme of training and networking opportunities, which aims to build capacity and resilience in the sector.

STAND WITH US – ROUNDS 1 and 2

Thanks to your support, we have successfully run two rounds of the Stand With Us fund. The first round awarded £510,000 through 25 grants in 2022. A second round of the fund opened for applications in June and July 2024. In December 2025, we were pleased to announce the distribution of £537,322 in grants to 23 organisations. Of these, 50% are led by-and-for Black and racially minoritised women and girls, and 54% are operating in the top 10% of the most disadvantaged areas of the UK.

See the announcement here.

The current round of SWU funded projects are ongoing, due for completion at the end of the 2025, so we will publish a full impact report for round 2 in Spring 2026. But from the interim reports grant holders submitted we can already see SWU's significant impact these organisations – and the women and girls they support:

Over 10,000 women and girls have already benefitted– nearly matching the number of beneficiaries in total from round one of the fund.
Grant holders have noted their organisations’ foundations strengthened, feeling better prepared to sustain and grow under the pressing challenges of reduced funding and resources, and rising need.
New strategic partnerships flourished as SWU provided leaders with the time and space for collaboration, strengthening the women and girls sector as a whole.

STORY OF IMPACT

Quetzal is a Leicester-based charity offering free, trauma-informed counselling and support to women recovering from childhood sexual abuse. In November 2024, a Stand With Us grant allowed the organisation to hire a part-time Operations Manager, giving CEO Deborah Knight vital headspace for strategic planning. “The real impact is, with time, you can see where the best opportunities are,” she says.

With Rosa funding, Quetzal maximised its team's strengths and developed valuable income streams. These included launching an in-house counselling course, finding opportunities for paid advisory work, and transforming unused office space into a virtual charity shop. While none of these ventures alone ensure sustainability, Knight says, they “all have the dual benefit of mission and income”. This flexibility helps reduce reliance on grants. “These ideas have been floating around for a while,” Knight explains, “but without the space to properly assess and plan, we’ve struggled to get them off the ground.”

WHAT'S NEXT?

We are proud of the impact Stand With Us has delivered to date, but we know our work to make the UK safer for all women and girls is not done. As women and girls organisations face rising levels and complexity of need against a backdrop of decreased funding, Stand With Us is more important than ever.

So, funding permitted, we aim to open a third round of Stand with Us n Spring 2026, distributing a minimum of 25 grants of up to £25k by autumn 2026. Alongside funding, grant holders will receive free training and networking opportunities, shaped around the needs and skills gaps they’ve identified.

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