We have been a full year in our new community space - this has offered new benefits but also some new challenges for the team. Since moving to our new space we have found ourselves having more personal conversations with women in our community as they open up to us about their situations; looking for support, advocacy or just a listening ear. Many of the women that visit MILK have experienced gender based violence and there is a severe lack of support services available to them. Waiting lists are long and often they face multiple barriers to accessing these services including language, travel, childcare, and lack of trust in professionals. We break some of these barriers by building relationships through regular, varied activities in a welcome and secure environment. Women often come to us because a friend has recommended MILK to them as a safe space. We have toys and art materials to keep children entertained and we do our best to listen and support women when they feel comfortable enough to confide in us. We work with the person to find suitable support and we stay with them through the process of making appointments with health professionals, accessing specialist services and ensuring they know and understand what will happen next and what to expect when they go somewhere new. So much of what we are able to do is because of the enthusiasm and generosity of volunteers and collaborators. Govanhill is brimming with individuals and organisations working hard to make their community fairer and we are proud to be among them. With more time, flexibility and space last year we were able to provide more opportunities for the community to come together in support of each other. We spent around 400 hours last year dealing with social workers, housing officers, health professionals and other agencies to make sure the women we work with are getting the level of care and respect they deserve. There are many social issues affecting most of us at the moment with housing, unemployment, education and health care being amongst the biggest issues. Life is difficult enough without adding the additional barriers of digital exclusion, English language and literacy. We know they system is broken and frustrating for a lot of people but that doesn't mean those at the bottom of the ladder should not be treated with the same kindness and dignity as everyone else.

We have always tried to be led by our community and the changes we've made in the last few years have been no different. We have been running a full timetable of classes and events from our Community Space and we have been steadily growing in numbers and participation. Refugee and migrant voices, particularly women's voices, are deliberately not platformed. They are too often intentionally excluded from creative activities with their experiences cut from the narrative. We have always worked to make sure that the experiences of the women from our community are heard. There is no single perspective about a whole group of entire community, that is why individual voices from within communities can bring a more realistic representation of the diverse experiences people have every day. We gather feedback from all our projects and we constantly hear the same thing coming from participants - the importance of feeling heard and the value in being given the space to be creative and find expression in safe environment. When people are involved in all stages of the process of project or idea it hold so much more value to them. They are connected to it in a way that they cannot be if it is designed without them and they are only invited to participate in the later stages, once the idea has been formed already. This means that out projects often take a different direction to the one they started with but that can lead to unexpected and lovely outcomes.

There was a total of £38,443 paid to the directors over the period for work performed in running the CIC and delivering the services provided.

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration