President Stella welcomed Gail Heath, CEO of Manchester Women’s Aid, as our speaker at the January meeting. Gail spoke about how Manchester Women’s Aid merged with the Pankhurst Trust last year and the work that is done there. She told us about the services offered to support women both at the Pankhurst centre and in the refuges and about the current financial problems of running these services. Women’s Aid are campaigning to make the use of coercion and control criminalised and have a strategy to move away from having to rely on local authority funding.
There was also a presentation by Martin Smedley, CEO of the charity Act4Africa, and member Barbara Blaber who asked if the club would propose the charity’s HEAL (Health, Empowerment and Livelihoods for women in Malawi) project as SIGBI’s next Quadrennial project. Members voted unanimously in support of this, and the bid will be submitted as long as the agreement of the South Lancashire region can be secured.
