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Leeds city centre project gets share of £300,000 to help women drug addicts
A former crack and heroin addict has welcomed a cash boost for the Leeds project which helped her turn her life around.
Sheena, who didn’t want to reveal her full name, said her life was falling apart before she gained Together Women’s support. And she believes she would have lost her son if she had continued the downward spiral which had already cost her her health, home and freedom.
The Leeds city centre project, which aims to help turn women away from a life of crime, has now been awarded a slice of £3.5m Government funding to help women like Sheena.
The Together Women Project in Yorkshire and the Humber will be handed £315,000 to share between Leeds, Bradford, Hull and Sheffield.
The cash will help it provide its life-changing services to help women tackle the reasons they commit crimes, as well as access advice on health and education and receive much-needed counselling in many cases.
Rokaiya Khan, chief executive of the Together Women Project in Yorkshire and the Humber, said she was “delighted” with the cash injection but said the Leeds centre cost £250,000 a year to run and could only continue with the backing of other organisations too.
“The local authority, housing departments, primary care trusts, all have to play their part in funding the work that we do if we are going to see long-term benefits in reducing offending.”
She added: “What we provide is far more cost-effective than sending a woman to prison.”
Sheena grew up in the Armley area and was already drinking, fighting and taking drugs by the age of 13.
By the time she was 20 she had already been to prison and by 22 she was addicted to two of the most destructive class A drugs with a history of offending behaviour including theft, burglary and assault.
She said: “I didn’t see my family.
“I didn’t eat. I looked like a skeleton. You could see all my ribs and bones. I lost my house and all my possessions.”
Sheena was “dubious” about the centre’s ability to help her as previous organisations had failed.
But this time it was different.
She said: “They weren’t judgmental. They were really nice people and didn’t make me feel like a criminal.”
She took confidence-building courses to improve her self esteem and was provided with emotional support to help her cope with abuse she had suffered.
The 25-year-old, whose son is just seven months old, said: “I would have definitely lost him if I had carried on how I was going.
“Together Women helped me with a lot of stuff. I did a parenting course there and stuff like that.”
Now she’s a full-time mum who describes herself as “happy and healthy” with a “baby that’s well looked after”.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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Comments
There are 3 comments to this article
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Cosmo
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 04:50 PMWomen only, men.......go away !
leedsman
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 11:41 AMIs there a similar scheme for males?
luvmeteam
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 06:39 AMI live in chapeltown the largest open drug dealing area in yorkshire and have little sympathy for drug dealers or drug users, many of the places i played as a kid i cannot let my children play because of needles,or because they might see men or women with there pants down injecting.Yes i am old school, if these people think they have had it rough they should take a walk in the childrens cancer ward where people fight to reach there next birthday.
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