Our Impact
New Dawn New Day is a small charity that delivers a big impact. With our help, over 230 women per year have turned their lives around and created a brighter future for themselves and their families.
New Dawn New Day is committed to ensuring that:
- Our support and interventions are having a positive impact on the women we work with
- We stay true to our organisational mission
- We are delivering effective outcomes for our clients, service funders and the wider community
- We are transparent and accountable
- We are able to provide evidence of our ability to achieve outcomes
In order to ensure the above, it is important that we are able to measure and demonstrate the changes women make as a result of our support and interventions.
To demonstrate that we are achieving our aims, we have in place a system for recording change for each woman who uses our services. To this end we have devised a simple system of measuring change along a number of pathways, to demonstrate distance travelled in terms of areas such as health and wellbeing, social and economic circumstances, criminogenic needs and safety.
"When you walk into the centre it feels like a huge hug. The energy & atmosphere are so lovely, even talking on the phone to staff. It's a safe space & I can drop my walls"
The following is a list of needs and strengths women may present with when accessing support at New Dawn New Day. Most of the needs relate to the recognised offending pathways. This means that if a woman presents with a combination of these needs, she is more likely to end up in the criminal justice system or re-offend. Similarly, if a woman who presents with these needs demonstrates that she is making progress in those areas, her likelihood of becoming reinvolved with the criminal justice system reduces.
The pathways are also suitable for measuring positive impact and change for women who are not at risk of offending, but have complex needs are vulnerable to harm and exploitation.
Of the women who accessed our service between 2020-2021
Experienced domestic violence or sexual assault as an adult
Self-harmed to cope with their experiences
Had a history of criminal offending
Had children under 18 living with them
Experienced trauma or adversity as a child
Experienced Social Services involvement when they were children
Misused substances to cope with their trauma
Had their own children taken into care
Were suffering with an eating disorder
Had been involved in prostitution
It is our belief that the actual figures may be far higher, due to the stigma and potential shame associated with speaking about these experiences. Many of the women we work with have never told anyone about their experiences of trauma and abuse, some go most of their lives without understanding that past traumatic experiences have significantly negatively impacted them.
Many of the women we work with present with diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health conditions relating to the trauma they have experienced. Often, we find that the women we work with have difficulty accessing mainstream mental health services, with many slipping through the cracks and never receiving the vital mental health support they desperately need.
Of the women in this period, 68% had been diagnosed with Depression and 55% had been diagnosed with Anxiety. Women also experienced Personality disorder, including Dissociative Identify Disorder and Borderline (emotionally unstable) Personality Disorder, PTSD, eating disorders, ADHD, Agoraphobia, Bipolar disorder and Psychosis. The team have noticed an increase in referrals which mention a diagnosis of Personality Disorder. It is notable that many traits of these types of disorders can be interpreted as normal responses to experiencing trauma.
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