The WILDE Foundation, WIN’s Charitable Arm

The WILDE Foundation was established for the training and personal coaching of vulnerable women and girls in the UK, Caribbean and Africa. With a strong focus on work in London and the UK, our mission is to educate women and girls globally to embrace economic empowerment through creativity.

We know from our experience and research that women who are in charge of their own finances tend not to linger in abusive relationships.

Our aims:

To support existing women’s groups in the UK, Caribbean and Africa to deal with problems relating to rape, incest, harmful cultural practices and domestic violence by using creative and entrepreneurial tools
To raise the funds necessary to establish and maintain a creative and entrepreneurial centre in West London to empower women and girls
To make women aware of their hidden potential by providing a variety of motivational training courses

The WILDE Foundation’s Projects

Protect the Girl Child Campaign

Help raise funds and awareness to stop sexual and domestic abuse and harmful hidden practices against women and girls, globally

To plan for a day, catch a fish; to plan for a year, plant rice; to plan for a decade, plant a tree; but to plan for a lifetime, educate a girl.

is our ongoing campaign to help raise funds and awareness to stop harmful hidden practices against women and girls by encouraging financial autonomy.

We aim to fundraise for the building of centres to provide a creative and entrepreneurial platform for women and girls in the UK, Jamaica and Namibia, where they can grow skills which help them develop economic independence, and we will roll out the campaign to other Caribbean and African countries.

The story behind the Protect the Girl Child campaign is one of child sexual abuse.

Mindy hardly knew her father. He would come out of the blue to visit her perhaps once a year, bringing sweets and toys, and then he was gone. She lived with her maternal grandparents, as her mother was a drug addict. When her father came to see her that summer, she had just turned 11. She was surprised that he wanted to take her to stay with him for the holidays - he never had before. She was excited too, until she got there and realised she had to sleep in his bed with him. Not only that, but he told her she was now a young woman and ready for lessons a father has to teach his daughter. She was raped that night. And all the nights over the next two years that he kept her away from her grandparents.

We want little girls like Mindy to know what a healthy relationship between a father and a daughter should look like, and this is what our FREE ME TO BE ME Domestic Abuse Ambassador training aims to achieve. Every £1 you give goes a good way to making this happen.

FREE ME TO BE ME Domestic Abuse Ambassador Training

We joined forces with and we are in partnership with Maendeleo Services and CAME Women and Girls Development Organisation in West London to deliver our flagship training programme, FREE ME TO BE ME Domestic Abuse Ambassador Training, for women and girls who want to empower and support other women and girls who are going through domestic abuse. The WILDE Foundation has been successful in getting the training course CPD-certified, so we are delighted to say that it is now accredited.

Our our FREE ME TO BE ME training programme gives women a toolkit to enable them to carry out self-assessments, give basic advice to their peers, friends and relatives who are experiencing domestic abuse, and signpost the correct agencies. The course is suitable for health visitors, probation officers, bank staff, teachers, medical staff, students, social care staff and domestic abuse support workers, in fact anyone who works with the public.

Our Domestic Abuse Ambassador Training programme will draw on WILDE’s experience with female writers and artists to develop and implement art projects and use creative tools to give basic awareness of domestic violence.

As we work to highlight the insidious acts of domestic abuse and sexual violence against women and girls, our working partnership continues to grow. We are also networking with Eve For Life, Pure Potential and ICASS in Jamaica, as well as other organisations working to support survivors of gender-based violence, and we continue to make global contacts with women’s groups, organisations and companies across the globe who are working to eliminate sexual and domestic abuse and harmful practices against women and girls through creativity and economic empowerment.

Young WILDE

It’s Time to Get Creative for Young WILDE...

Young WILDE is a creative project of The WILDE Foundation, aimed at young women aged 11 to 25 (there are two groups, respectively for 11 to 15-year-olds and for 16 to 25-year-olds), using creative tools to combat domestic and sexual abuse.

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of teenage relationship abuse, with teenage girls now considered to be the group at greatest risk from violent relationships.

In 2008 WILDE International Network undertook some work for the National Children’s Bureau, where we met with boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 to discuss their awareness of domestic abuse. The question asked was When is it ok for a boy to hit a girl?. The following answers came only from the girls, who blatantly explained: If you’re rude or you dis him. Another answer was: If he tells you to do something and you disobey him, and another was: If you wear short skirts or revealing clothes.

There is a lot of work to be done in terms of boosting confidence, self-worth and self-esteem in some of our young people, and we aim to accomplish this through creative and entrepreneurial projects.

Young WILDE aims:

To establish a global network of young women ambassadors with the FREE ME TO BE ME Domestic Abuse Ambassador Training, supporting and signposting women and girls who are victims of domestic and sexual abuse, by teaching them skills such as event planning, marketing and promotion, budgeting, report and funding application writing
To train young girls in the process of self-love and self-respect, and in what a healthy relationship consists of
To empower, educate, restore and build lost values, morals, confidence, self-esteem and much more

These are all things they don’t learn in education or at home. In today’s society this lack of awareness in young women leads to problems such as domestic violence and teenage pregnancy.