LimeCulture is 1 year old! What a fantastic year it has been for us!
For those of you that don’t know anything about LimeCulture, we are a specialist sexual violence organisation that was established in July 2011. Our ultimate aim is to improve the competence and confidence of frontline professionals responding to victims of sexual violence.
We decided to set up LimeCulture after completing a 2 year programme of work for the Department of Health and Home Office supporting local partnerships across England to improve their response to sexual violence. During 2009-2011, we supported 39 police force areas and their key partners (Health, Local Authority, third sector etc). Throughout that period of work, we recognised the overwhelming need to support frontline professionals. These professionals are key in helping and supporting the people who are often the most vulnerable in our society. Many of these professionals told us that they often work in isolation and have training and support needs themselves.
So in July 2011, LimeCulture was born. We brought together a range of national experts (from forensic scientists to SARC managers, police officers to psychologists!) and asked them to be part of LimeCulture. Luckily, they all set yes and set about developing training courses and workshops that would support the frontline professionals that we are aiming to support!
A year on and we have successfully run a number of training courses. We are now 2 modules into our 3rd Independence Sexual Violence Adviser (ISVA) Development Programme. Initially, we only intended to run it once and the demand has been so great that we have now run it 3 times since September!
Our Crisis Worker Development Programme has been run twice and we have now provided bespoke training to a number of Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCS) across the country. Plus we have run a range of other workshops and masterclasses for professionals.
We are in the process of developing our training programme for the next 12 months, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. We are really keen to make sure that all our training is developed by professionals FOR professionals….so keep us posted about what you need or want!
Thanks for your support!