Neema Women CIC

Neema Women is a not-for-profit organisation created to empower and support women and girls from disadvantaged and vulnerable backgrounds. Our beneficiaries are women from BAME and low-income backgrounds in vulnerable situations such as domestic abuse, homelessness, poverty, poor mental health, financial hardship, and others.

Our work in suicide prevention

Our organisation focuses on supporting the mental health of women and young women through a holistic and tailored approach. In the fight against suicide, our organisation provides therapy, peer support groups for survivors of suicide attempts to share their experiences, and social activities such as outings and wellness classes,

Our current priorities

Through our work we have seen that there is a lack of support for young people experiencing poor mental health and suicidal thoughts. This is particularly true for young women from BAME backgrounds. In the past year alone, we have received a significant number of referrals from sixth forms to support young women who had made suicide attempts and/or who practised self-harm.

This is why this year we have decided to launch a new set of strategies and services targeting those vulnerable individuals, in the hope of reducing the number of young women attempting suicide. However, we are still dedicated to supporting all women who experience suicidal thoughts or poor mental health.

Our current challenges

Our main challenge is the capacity of our organisation to support all women making suicide attempts or self-harm within our local area. This is mainly due to the fact that we are a relatively small organisation. We also face barriers when it comes to supporting women who are considered hard to reach due their multiple disadvantages. This includes things such as language barriers or disability.