Becky Dewdney-York Joins LimeCulture’s Core Team

This summer has seen LimeCulture put in place plans to bolster their Core Team.  Due to LimeCulture’s steadily increasing workload and their recent success in being awarded a number of significant new contracts, there has been an urgent need to strengthen the Core Team to meet these demands while continuing to ensure their high standards of quality remain a key priority.

Following a successful recruitment drive in the spring, Becky Dewdney-York joined the Core Team in July 2016. Becky, who was appointed to Programme Delivery Manager, will be in charge of managing LimeCulture’s programmes. This will include overseeing a range of LimeCulture’s key workstreams.

Becky comes with an impressive cv and extensive professional background that spans the NHS, central government and the voluntary sector. These experiences give Becky exactly the right skills and knowledge to take on this challenging role in LimeCulture’s Core Team. Becky is a qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner with practical experience of delivering a range of projects at both local regional and national levels. Becky is outcome focused with a keen eye for detail.

Throughout Becky’s career, she has worked on a range of important programmes, often with concurrent projects, managing multiple demands from a range of stakeholders to set and achieve objectives.  Becky’s most recent role was with an acute hospital trust where she was responsible for the development and delivery of financial and quality improvement plans, often to challenging timescales and with ever increasing financial constraint. In this climate Becky proved herself to be effective in delivering outcomes and ensuring very high standards were maintained.

LimeCulture are delighted that Becky has joined their Core Team and has already picked up the mantel, introducing improvements and building relationships with LimeCulture’s valued delivery partners.

To get in touch with Becky please email her Becky.Dewdney-York@limeculture.co.uk or call her at LimeCulture on 0203 633 0018

LimeCulture awarded 2nd region to provide Support Services to IICSA Truth Project

Today, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse announced contract for providing Truth Project support services in the north east.

‘Following a formal tender process, LimeCulture has been awarded a contract by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse to provide support services for victims and survivors attending the Inquiry’s Truth Project in the north east.

LimeCulture will use the resources of ARCH North East to provide support workers and counsellors for the Truth Project which is due to start in the region later this month.

In accordance with our terms of reference, the Truth Project will give victims and survivors of child sexual abuse a chance to share their experiences with the Inquiry. It will also provide the Inquiry with a clearer picture of the nature, scope and scale of child sexual abuse in England and Wales’.

Stephanie Reardon, Joint CEO of LimeCulture said today “We are delighted to begin working in partnership with Arch North East to provide support to those sharing their experience with the Inquiry via the Truth Project in the North East. We are also thrilled to have been awarded this second contract with the Inquiry. We are already working hard with our partner RASA  to deliver support to those attending the Truth Project in the North West region and are looking forward to working in the North East too. The Truth Project is an incredibly important initiative and we hope that victims and survivors of child sexual abuse feel able to come forward in the knowledge they will have access to high quality support if they need or want it in these two regions”

‘Call for Tools’: Part 1 of Developing a Bespoke Risk & Needs Assessment

We are pleased to announce that LimeCulture has secured funding to allow us to develop a risk and needs assessment for ISVAs to use with their clients. Once developed and tested, our aim is to make this bespoke tool available (free of charge) to all ISVAs in England and Wales to use in support of their clients.

We have been concerned for several years about the lack of a bespoke risk and needs assessment for use with victims of sexual violence, and we’ve been told by ISVAs that they are concerned that without such a tool they feel unable to properly support their clients. So we want to do something about it to support ISVAs to support their clients more effectively!

Many ISVAs have told us that due to the lack of a bespoke tool they use existing tools (such as those meant to assess victims of domestic abuse) inappropriately to work with their own clients, and therefore they don’t feel that they are picking up the risks to a victim of sexual violence or the needs they may have. Other ISVAs have told us that they have created their own risk assessments in the absence of anything bespoke, but are not always confident that they are assessing the risks adequately or appropriately identifying needs of people who have been sexually assaulted or raped. More worrying is the number of ISVAs who do no risk assessment at all when working with their clients, and it is this that has lead us to prioritise the development of a bespoke risk and needs assessment so that all ISVAs can have access to a bespoke tool to assess risks to their clients, and identify their needs so that ISVAs can be better informed as to what support is required.

The first phase of the project is to assess and analyse the tools that are currently out there, either being used in the UK or in other countries across the globe, to see whether there is anything that can be useful for a bespoke tool for ISVAs. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel and where there are tools already out there that adequately measure risk and/or need, then we’d like to include them in the bespoke assessment for ISVAs. We have already asked colleagues in Australia, Slovenia, and the US to let us know what tools are being used in their countries. We also need to focus on the UK and what tools are being used here. Therefore, the first part of our project is a ‘Call for Tools’ where we are asking all ISVAs to share with us what they currently use to assess risk and/or need. We don’t mind if its been ‘made up’ or is a little informal, or whether its a tool that has been developed by a service or a single professional. We don’t mind if you use an existing tool like the DASH risk assessment (for domestic abuse, stalking and harassment) or GAD7 or PHQ9 or CORE or something similar. We just want to know what you use, and whether it works to identify risk and/or need for victims of sexual violence.

As part of our “Call for Tools’ we are asking the ISVA workforce to email us with information about the tools that they use to measure risk and/or needs for their clients.

We would be grateful if information or the Tools themselves could be emailed as soon as possible to Becky.Dewdney-York@limeculture.co.uk