Stand with Us Fund

The Stand With Us fund invests in organisations that support women and girls whose lives have been devastated by male violence. The fund began as part of a movement, led by Reclaim These Streets, that inspired thousands of people to speak out against male violence in the wake of the appalling kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. Stand with Us channels their collective anger and grief into a fund to benefit all women and girls who are victims and survivors.

Thanks to your generous support, we opened the Stand With Us Fund for applications in 2022 and are delighted to be able to update you on what your funding helped us to achieve.

With you support, we were able to:
• Award £588,931 to 25 groups across the UK
• Award grants up to £25,000, with an average award of £23,057
• 52% of grants were awarded to black and minoritised led organisations.

How your funding helped

London based Aanchal Women’s Aid offers support for South Asian women who have experienced domestic abuse. They successfully applied for funding to help build their team’s capacity and develop a communications strategy to improve engagement and increase awareness of the charity.

Aanchal’s CEO, Sudarshan Bhuhi explains: “Being grassroots, you have to be masters of all trades. As a small organisation you’re often very task focussed, you don’t have the time to raise your heads up. The reason we’ve not been very visible in the past is because we’ve been too busy on the ground.
A priority for us was increasing our exposure. Some of the activities could be quite simple, such as social media, or blogs sharing our evaluation reports and the experiences of service users. We’ve managed to refresh our website which has been a huge benefit to us. It brought our service users closer to us, so it’s been really worthwhile.
The grant has given us an opportunity to focus on long-awaited reflections and improvements which other funds didn’t allow us. It’s also helped us to amplify our voice and has given us the confidence to be more bold.”

Apna Haq is an organisation that supports Black and minoritised women and girls living in Rotherham, South Yorkshire who are experiencing violence. As a small charity, the team have had to develop a big voice to ensure the issues of Black and minoritised women and girls are reflected in local and national policy.

CEO Zlakha Ahmed told us: “One of the things we wanted to do was increase capacity, and so taking on a full-time Finance and Operations post has really helped to free up my time and supported with bids for funding.
Our policy has been that we always involve at least 50% service users, community women, within our board. We have a range of professionals and community women – so having the funding to pay for an outside consultant to deliver training to the Board is invaluable.
I’ve been doing this for half of my life and funding shortages really weigh down on me as a leader. When I’m thinking about the future, I really want to leave the organisation in a strong position.
With Rosa’s funding, whatever the outcome for funding in the future, we feel in a much stronger position as an organisation.”
Why we need to keep the fund going

We’re really proud of the impact of the Stand With Us fund and hearing from organisations like Aanchal Women’s Aid and Apna Haq is so inspiring but sadly, there is still more to do.

In the UK over the last year:

• 107 women were killed at the hands of men. That’s two women a week.
• One in six women reported economic abuse from a partner.
• 1.7 million women experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales.
• Criminal convictions for sexual assault continued to decline.
• There was a rise in online misogyny and abuse, yet there was strong resistance from tech companies and Government to address online abuse effectively.
• Evidence showed that, from a young age, girls are subject to unchallenged misogyny and harassment in education settings.
• The police, the institution with a duty to protect women and girls, were guilty of systemic racism, misogyny and abuse.

This is why Rosa will be opening the Stand With Us fund for applications again in 2024. We aim to award £715k to support 25 organisations to be in a stronger position to survive, thrive and grow.

If you would like to be a part of this, you can support the fund by donating directly via GlobalGiving.

 Rosa is entirely dependent on charitable donations because, unlike many grant-makers, we do not have an endowment so your support really is vital. 

Thank you for making our work possible. We couldn’t do it without you.