“Hi, Someone Gave Me Your Number…”

Blog (7-9 min read) by Dawn Munroe, Innovation Lead at SafeLives and co-founder and Director of Bambuuu, a specialist By and For organisation dedicated to supporting Black and Brown women and girls experiencing or recovering from domestic abuse. 

 

“Hi, someone gave me your number…” 

This is how the referral process often starts for us at Bambuuu. A text, a WhatsApp message, sometimes a phone call. It sounds simple, but so much has happened before that message ever reaches us. An aunty, sister, friend or another survivor has probably already connected with that woman. She may have shared something about her own experience, told her that she has been there before, that she survived and that things can change. Then she gives her our number. In doing that, she is also saying, “I trusted these women. You can trust them too.” 

The majority of our referrals at Bambuuu come through word of mouth, and we wouldn’t want to lose that. It tells us that our community trusts us enough to bring another woman to our door. These are women who may never call themselves advocates or appear in our monitoring data. They are women who may simply think they gave somebody a telephone number, when actually they may have helped to save or change a life. They are sharing their experience, their strength and their hope. 

This year’s Black History Month theme, Honouring Our Communities, gives us an opportunity to recognise these contributions, but that recognition should not depend on a particular month. These women are doing this work every day, often without funding, titles or recognition. 

Whose contribution do we recognise?

Black people have contributed to communities, movements, science, culture, health and social change throughout history. Yet there is also a long pattern of those contributions being overlooked, diminished or recognised much later. 

I often think about Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, cells were taken from Henrietta, a Black woman receiving treatment for cervical cancer, without her knowledge or consent. Those cells, known as HeLa cells, became enormously important to medical research, contributing to scientific developments across the world. Yet for decades, the woman behind those cells was largely absent from the story. Her contribution was everywhere. Her name wasn’t. 

Of course, her experience and the experiences of today’s Black-led organisations are not the same, but there is a pattern worth noticing. Black people contribute, create, innovate and build, while sometimes the benefits travel much further than the recognition or resources ever do. 

Perhaps honouring our communities means recognising Black contribution while it is happening. Not decades later, not when somebody writes the history, and not when an organisation disappears and we suddenly recognise everything it was holding. 

What does ‘safe’ mean?

This matters particularly when we talk about domestic abuse. In our sector, we constantly use words like safety planning, safe accommodation and safe spaces. But we also need to ask: safe from what, and safe for whom? 

At Bambuuu, racism cannot sit outside a woman’s safety plan. We support women who are frightened not only because of the person causing them harm, but because of what they are experiencing outside their homes. We have supported women whose experiences of racism and hate have left them frightened to leave their homes or no longer feel safe in their area. 

Think about what that means for a survivor who has already lost family connections, financial security and everything familiar to her. We tell her she has been moved somewhere safe. But is she safe if she is frightened to walk down her new street because she is Black? Is she safe if she is too frightened to seek help because of her immigration status, or fears that asking for protection could put her at risk of deportation? 

Are we asking these questions when we safety plan? 

Culturally competent safety planning isn’t simply about adding a question about ethnicity to an assessment. It is understanding that domestic abuse doesn’t happen separately from the rest of a woman’s life. Racism doesn’t politely wait until domestic abuse has been resolved. Neither do poverty, immigration insecurity, disability, Islamophobia, homophobia, housing inequality or previous racial trauma. They can all be in the room at the same time. 

When a Black or Brown woman contacts a By and For service, she doesn’t have to begin by teaching the person supporting her why those things matter. She already has enough to carry. 

When women are not counted, whose lives are we protecting?

Through SafeLives’ Authentic Voice work, women supported by Bambuuu have had opportunities to share experiences that might otherwise remain unheard. SafeLives provided a platform, but the women brought the knowledge, courage and challenge. 

One example is the story of a Jamaican survivor whose experiences were brought together by other survivors following her death. Her story highlighted the barriers migrant women can face when domestic abuse, immigration insecurity and access to protection become entangled. 

One survivor said: “When you don’t have your right to stay in this country, you don’t count.” 

Those words have stayed with me. 

The women also raised an important question about the government’s ambition to halve violence against women and girls: how will women like her be counted when they do not feel counted as victims in the first place? 

How do we measure progress for women whose experiences may never appear in official data, whose circumstances prevent them from seeking help, or whose voices are absent from the spaces where decisions are made? 

Survivor voice must be more than consultation. It is not enough to invite women to share their experiences if those experiences do not influence what happens next. The women who came together to tell this story were not simply recounting somebody else’s experience. They were challenging systems and speaking up for women whose circumstances they recognised. 

That, too, is community. 

Why do By and Fors still have to explain why we exist?

By and For organisations are created by and led from within the communities they serve. Their expertise comes not only from professional training, but from lived experience, shared understanding, community relationships and knowledge of the barriers people face. 

We already understand the principle of specialism within the domestic abuse sector. Women’s specialist organisations exist because we recognise that women’s experiences of violence and abuse require dedicated expertise. So why does culturally specific expertise have to keep proving itself? 

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s A Patchwork of Provision report found that 78% of Black and minoritised survivors felt safer after accessing By and For support, compared with 48% who accessed another type of organisation. Yet By and For organisations were six times more likely than other specialist domestic abuse and VAWG organisations to receive no statutory funding. 

More recently, Imkaan’s 2026 Right to Resist report highlighted the continuing funding inequalities experienced by Black and minoritised By and For organisations. The research found that over half of the organisations studied experienced falling income in 2023-24, demonstrating the ongoing challenges of sustaining specialist services despite their vital role in supporting survivors. 

Equality and equity are not the same thing. If organisations have not historically had equal access to resources, infrastructure, influence and decision-making spaces, treating everybody exactly the same now does not create fairness. Sometimes equity requires us to recognise what has been missing and deliberately do something differently. 

Community knowledge and shared power

At Bambuuu, drawing on our own experiences and those shared by other By and For organisations, we have started developing a wheel that illustrates the different ways the domestic abuse and VAWG sector holds and exercises power over By and For services. It encourages us to look at commissioning and funding, quality assurance, research and evidence, partnerships, organisational systems and decision-making. 

For me, this is an important part of advancing anti-racism. It is not simply about inviting By and For organisations into existing spaces, but examining how those spaces operate and whose interests they serve. Being invited to contribute after decisions have already been made is not the same as sharing power. If we genuinely value the expertise of Black and Brown communities, we must also be willing to question the systems that determine how that expertise is recognised, resourced and heard. 

Community knowledge does not always arrive in a research report. It comes from relationships, lived experience, cultural understanding and years of working alongside communities. Recognising that expertise sometimes means being able to say, “We don’t know, but we know who does.”  

Last year, when I wrote about a day in the life of Bambuuu, I talked about sisterships rather than partnerships between By and For organisations. I still believe in that. No single organisation holds a community. Communities hold each other. 

The mirror

One of the ideas running through our anti-racist work is the importance of being willing to look in the mirror. So I want to leave a mirror here for the reader. 

What do you know about By and For organisations? Why do you know what you know? Have you worked alongside one, read its research or listened to the women leading it? Would racism form part of your safety planning with a Black survivor? Do you recognise community knowledge as expertise? 

And if your answer to some of those questions is, “Actually, I don’t know,” that’s okay as a starting point. But don’t let it become the ending. 

Ask yourself why you don’t know, and then ask: what am I going to do about the limits of what I know? 

Black History Month asks us to honour our communities. Anti-racism asks us what happens when the month is over. 

And that brings me back to where I started. 

“Hi, someone gave me your number…” 

Maybe those words sound a little different now. 

Before that message reached Bambuuu, something had already happened. A conversation, a disclosure, a woman listening to another woman, someone recognising the signs because perhaps she had lived them herself. Someone sharing enough of her story for another woman to believe that her life could be different. 

Someone saying, “I know somewhere.” 

And then handing over a number. 

I call it community. 

That woman may never appear in our monitoring data. Nobody will count the conversation she had. There is no outcome box for the moment she said, “They helped me. They might be able to help you too.” But she may have helped to save a life. 

These are the women I want us to honour: the women passing the number, the women who survived and reached back to help someone coming behind them. 

To those Black women, we see you, we honour you, and we salute you. 

And I want us to honour the By and For organisations those communities have built and trusted too, not just with words or during Black History Month, but through how we listen, partner, commission, resource, recognise expertise and share power. 

Because somewhere, another woman is picking up her phone and typing: 

“Hi, someone gave me your number…” 

And before we ever answer, her community has already begun the work.