Dorset community interest company struggling for funding

DAIT 4 Change delivers free domestic abuse awareness courses in Dorset but may be forced to shut down.

The company has set up a go fund me page in order to raise emergency funds to carry on running their courses.

They are a non-profit organisation that runs The Freedom Programme and recovery Toolkit in Dorchester or online via zoom.

They are the only outreach service in Dorset that offers a recovery toolkit.

This organisation was originally set up as DAIT, a decade ago, but closed down in 2022 due to the difficulty of finding funding.

Lisa Howell, who previously worked with DAIT, then set up DAIT 4 Change as a community interest company.

This is the first term, since they began, that the company are running for free – if they don’t receive any funding by March, they will have to stop running their courses.

Lisa said: “It is just pots of money dry, we are applying for bids intenders, but there’s so many people running for each pot of money that every time I’m applying, I’m usually amongst 50 other companies.

“We have amazing feedback, we run Hacked, which is a social saving calculator, which looks at the well-being of people at the end of the course.”

Lisa states that the last course they did they saved over £1 million in social saving funds.

She said: “It has a huge social saving on local communities and benefits the individuals and their children.

“If we have to stop running these courses it will have a huge cost to the community and those people who will end up going back into abusive relationships is going to rise.

“This issue is not going away; the figures are not changing.

“By not having these courses, without the knowledge and without being able to spot the signs and build up people’s self-esteem, they are going to sit in that downward spiral.”