Safe Ireland publishes a Review of its work for 2015 and 2016
It is with great pleasure that we in SAFE Ireland present our Review for the years 2015 and 2016. This has been a positive and productive time and we have achieved many things.
We have been steadfast at all times in collaborating with our Members throughout the country to ‘centre stage’ women and children’s needs in all that we do together. We are as committed as ever to making Ireland the safest country in the world for women and children. We understand that inequality begins in the home and it must end in the home. We realise that this ambition will take time to manifest and all of us working together over the coming years. But it is possible, we live in a relatively small jurisdiction, a jurisdiction that is less complicated than many. But more than that we have a track record in this country of providing leadership and vision for change, we have led the way many times and particularly in marriage equality achieved in 2015, in the lifetime of this review.
That said, we have work to do and we have changes to make if we want to have an impact on the lives of women and children experiencing domestic violence. We have to find better ways of working at interagency, interdisciplinary levels, we all have a role to play to end domestic violence. We need to be less busy building our agencies, profiling our agencies and really get serious about eradicating domestic violence from our homes and communities. We need to enable a generosity of spirit to grow in our work together, it is not what we do but how we do it together that matters.
In 2015 following an extensive review and consultation process with internal and external stakeholders, the Board and Members of SAFE Ireland agreed a 5-year Strategic Plan Changing Culture and Transforming the Response to Domestic Violence in Ireland 2015-2020 which sets our goal, core vision and key priorities that will underpin our work over the coming years. 2015 marked the start of the delivery of our transformative social change agenda on the issue with the support of The Community Foundation for Ireland who has committed to part-fund the implementation of our Strategic Plan over the next 5 years.
In 2016 with our Members and colleagues throughout the globe SAFE Ireland created the SAFE Ireland Summit, a place where we dared to listen, where we dared to think outside the box, where we posed questions and pushed unwanted boundaries that hemmed us in and kept violence alive. It was a place of vital endeavour, we dared to believe that Ireland can become the safest country in the world and we understood that we needed to change the world, we needed a bigger vision for everybody throughout the world. We will build on this work so that the world can be safer for all of us, we will dare to stand for LOVE and we invite you to join us in this sacred work.
View the SAFE Ireland Annual Review 2015-2016 here (PDF 10Mb)
