Closing our BRAVE Service

With great sadness, the team at Enabling Town Slough is sorry to announce that our BRAVE and BRAVE Too services will be coming to an end on the 31st of March 2025, at the close of this financial year. We would like to thank our dedicated BRAVE and BRAVE Too staff, as well as our incredible and inspiring BRAVE Ambassadors, for their hard work in supporting people who have experienced domestic abuse for over half a decade. We have had over 1300 referrals across the life of the service, highlighting the demand for a psychologically-informed domestic abuse support service like BRAVE.

The BRAVE service began in 2019 as a way of providing psychological support for people who have been through domestic abuse. Because BRAVE offered people the psychological tools to manage their distress and take back control of their lives, we believed it was unique in the field of domestic abuse support services. Over the years, BRAVE and BRAVE Too have enjoyed a fruitful relationship with community partners and support from the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, without whom BRAVE would not exist.

Our first BRAVE Ambassadors, the resilient and inspiring volunteers who have enlivened and empowered our service, started in 2021. The Ambassadors all completed the 12-week BRAVE programme followed by our 2-year BRAVE EMBRACE, a weekly co-produced space where group members could give and receive support for their struggles. As volunteers, they helped promote the service, supported new and existing members, and worked with community partners to spread the word about the power of the BRAVE community. Our Ambassadors conveyed the power of BRAVE in a more personal, impactful way than staff could, even working alongside the police to include the inspiring and crucial voices of people with lived experience in improving the police service around domestic abuse. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work alongside our Ambassadors and we are immensely grateful for all their time and energy.

BRAVE Too, our service supporting men who have experienced domestic abuse, began in 2022 to complement the BRAVE programme for women. Recognising the serious gap in service provision for men in this area, despite the fact that around 1 in 4 cases of domestic abuse are perpetrated against men, BRAVE Too offered a much-needed space for men to talk about their experiences and share support together. BRAVE Too then developed its own Ambassadors who added their vital, underrepresented voices to our other volunteers.

As we look back in 2025, BRAVE can be proud of building an invaluable, unique community that held one immutable message at its heart: we are BRAVE together.

Thank you to every single person who has been part of our BRAVE community.