More About BSARCH...

In 1987 a group of women from a wide variety of backgrounds came together and met on a voluntary basis with the aim of developing a support service for women and girls in Barnsley. Over a period of two years we met, raised money and trained before eventually opening a helpline service for women who had been raped or sexually abused. Initially, this functioned on a shoestring, we had no premises of our own and the bare minimum of equipment. On Thursday evenings we would wind the telephone downstairs to a borrowed office and take calls in the 2-hour helpline session. For the rest of the week, the answer phone was locked away in a filing cabinet in a disused attic!!

After securing additional funding, in July 1991 we moved into the rooms that we still occupy and were at last able to offer face to face counselling to women in a safe and comfortable environment. Our workload on all fronts continued to increase over the years and the addition of new volunteers and the employment of a Development worker and a part-time admin worker in 1996 enabled us to extend even further the amount of service we offered to women. It became evident that the majority of women we were counselling had been abused as children. As such, in 1996 we changed our name from Barnsley Rape Crisis to that which it is today, with the intention of making the service more accessible and appropriate.

In 1997, we decided that we wanted to expand the range of services we offered by opening a young women’s project, to support survivors of sexual abuse aged 13 –25. We submitted a successful bid to the National Lottery and the centre opened in 1998, complete with a paid development worker and a team of 9 volunteers, who had been recruited and trained by the BSARCH collective. The centre provided an invaluable source of support to young women in Barnsley for several years, before unfortunately closing down at the end of 2000 due to the dwindling number of volunteers.

Unfortunately at the same time we lost our core funding for the main project, which meant we had to make our Development Worker redundant. This was a severe blow to an organisation as small as ours and as a result this put us under a tremendous amount of pressure, as for a time the volunteers had to run the service on our own, with very little money. At the beginning of 2000, we secured short term funding for a part time Recruitment and Development worker to help build up our project again, and we were able to recruit more volunteers, put in a Community Fund bid for a Development Worker and a part-time Trainer and begin to offer more support again to our volunteers.

That bid was successful and led us into a new phase for the organisation, which began in September 2002. The past two years have been very busy and productive. We hope they will lead to many more years of successfully providing a much needed service for women and girls in Barnsley and of expanding to respond to the needs of our local community.

©BSARCH 2004