Contribute to worldwide women’s safety
Support the Worldwide Women’s Helplines Project: Lila.help
Imagine you are in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language or have a support network to fall back on, and you are a victim of gender-based violence. You are in need of help, but where do you go? How do you find a trustworthy shelter or helpline? Before Lila.help, there was no respected international website with trustworthy and updated information about helplines, shelters and NGOs across the globe.
We changed this, by creating lila.help.
Why?
1 in 3 women experiences violence at least once in her life. Fewer than 40 percent of women who experience violence, seek help of any sort. On top of that, the impact of the pandemic on women and girls is staggering. Recent UN Women data shows an intensification of intimate partner violence, and estimates 243 million women and girls have been affected in the past 12 months. Counts from every part of the world show an increase of 25% up to 50% of reported cases of domestic violence during the pandemic.
What?
To protect survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence, the barrier to find help should be as low as possible. Therefore, reliable and accessible information is of the utmost importance. In this light, the Global Network of Women’s Shelters (GNWS) launched a worldwide directory of women’s support services, called Lila.help.
With Lila.help we:
- Display available help for people that experience gender-based violence at any time, wherever they are in the world.
- Make sure all shared information verified for accuracy and trustworthiness.
- Increase the number of people finding the help they need
- Prevent a victim reaching out to help and tragically not finding any because of a phone number change or non-updated website.
- Are a referral source for supportive friends, family, professionals.
What will happen with your donation?
All donations are welcome and can be used to further develop the directory and support the network. Our goals:
- Technological improvements: we aim to make our website more user friendly, for instance by providing a specialized search. Imagine you are an Arabic speaking woman in Spain. Because of your health, you can’t walk and you have a dog that is very dear to you and which you cannot leave behind. You want to find a shelter where the staff speaks your language, which is accessible by wheelchair and where pets are allowed. With the specialized search, women will be able to easily find out which shelters meet these requirements.
- Let the world know about Lila.help: to make sure women around the world know about Lila.help, we will need to run global campaigns and invest in search engine optimization.
- Dig deeper: to identify and support the available shelters and NGOs in every country and territory in the world, we need to dig deeper. In this way, we are able to provide complete and localized information on women’s support services.
Other ways to help us
Right now, donations are most needed to keeping growing and developing our directory Lila.help. Beyond donations, you can help us by:
- Volunteering and sharing your own knowledge and expertise, for instance to help us with our communication, marketing, software development and fundraising.
- Spreading the word! Follow us on social media (Facebook & Twitter) to like, share & comment our posts.
About the GNWS
The GNWS is a global alliance of women’s shelters and other organizations working to protect survivors of gender-based violence. We are the peak organization to connect and represent helplines, crisis centers and shelters all over the world. Working from a human rights and feminist perspective, we strive to meet the needs of all women experiencing violence.
Every contribution is very welcome and useful! Use the button above to support us via PayPal, or if you don’t use PayPal, you can also support us via GoFundMe.
Thank You!