17th March 2020

At Refugee Women Connect, our top priority is to protect the safety of our service users, volunteers and staff. This is why we have been monitoring the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) very closely for some time now.

At very early stages we postponed our Outreach Services to protect everybody involved. We then reassessed the situation and brought in extra measures to allow us to continue to provide these much needed services safely; this included extra cleaning facilities, clear information on the virus that’s accessible for everyone, and carrying out detailed checks to ensure nobody who had travelled to ‘at risk’ countries attended our Outreach sessions. Those who were unable to attend our sessions were invited to access support via telephone, so they still got any support they needed.

As the situation progresses, we have carefully considered what measures we must now put in place to continue to mitigate any risk whilst still providing our vital services.

Please see below all updates to service provision as of Monday 16th March:

• There will be no drop-in sessions on Tuesdays at St Brides and Fridays at All Saint’s Church in Liverpool. This is with immediate effect until further notice. We will instead be offering a telephone support service.
• Our Thursday drop-ins at Deafness Resource Centre, St Helens will also be cancelled until further notice and phone support offered instead.
• Our Early Action sessions will now be carried out for newly arrived service users via the telephone with the support of our volunteers.
• Our Casework service will now be carried out remotely via telephone and video link.
• Our face to face mental health work will be cancelled but our phone check-ins will continue and we are working on offering wellness sessions via video link.

Our team will be home based during this time and can be contacted in the usual way or via [email protected].

We thank you in advance for your patience and understanding at this unpredictable time. Please rest assured we will continue to update our website and social media platforms as and when any changes are made.

If you do have any questions at all, please email us at [email protected] and we will be more than happy to assist you.