South West Community Benefit Fund: Hollie Gazzard Trust
About this project
The aim of the Hollie Gazzard Trust is to support people who are, or who might be, victims of domestic abuse.
The organisation is a registered charity established in 2014 following the murder of 20-year-old Hollie Gazzard by her partner. Her family wishes to raise awareness of domestic abuse, stalking and knife crime with the goal of keeping young people safe and to strengthen communities in Gloucester.
The organisation delivers, among other things, a series of educational programmes on domestic abuse, stalking, and helps to promote healthy relationships in schools and colleges. They also have accredited training programmes including Working without Fear which supports businesses and organisations to identify and deal with domestic abuse, stalking and coercion.
In 2015 with the help of Lottery funding they developed the Hollie Guard App which transforms smartphones into an advanced personal safety device. You just need to shake the screen and tap on the phone to create an alert. This app has now been loaded 250,000 times. They have also accessed funding to enable people, who cannot afford the upgrade of this programme, which provides a professional monitoring service, to have this additional service free of charge.
Statistics from the Police state that 2.4 million adults aged 16-74 have experienced domestic abuse in the last year – the Hollie Gazzard Trust believes this only shows a partial picture of this behaviour.
Request for funding
The requested grant was for the organisation to run six training sessions, the aim of the workshops is to provide healthy relationships and they include stalking or coercive control workshops in schools in Gloucestershire. The funding enabled six half day workshops to be delivered by professional trainers and each workshop has 30 attendees. In total, the workshops provided worked with 180 young people over six months.
Meeting the aims of the fund
This organisation has sprung from a tragic event which badly affected everyone who knew Hollie. The family have been determined that something good should come from this. They have worked tirelessly to develop this now very effective organisation that had developed training programmes for young people and valuable safety apps for those at risk.
It meets the criteria of the programme by investing in the future of particularly young people for the benefit of the wider community in a very difficult field.
The purpose of the fund
SWPA work with our members and South West Community Matters to distribute grants of up to £1,000 to local projects and causes.
The overall aim of the programme is to increase community facilities and community benefits particularly for those most in need, in local communities.
The focus will be on activities that enable people from diverse backgrounds to become engaged in their neighbourhoods and communities and to support those organisations that are bringing about real change to the lives of the people who live in those communities.
