Abianda Updates
Updated: Oct 1
This quarter, more than most, has reminded us why partnership work matters, not as a line in a report, but as something that actually changes what's possible for the young women we exist to support.
We've spent time meeting with organisations doing brilliant work in this space, Power to Prevail, Art Against Knives, and others who rarely make headlines but sharpen how we think regardless. And our free Bitesize seminar sold out in two hours, before we'd even posted it on LinkedIn, a real sign of how hungry this sector is for solution-focused thinking.
12 for 12
Twelve years since Abi started Abianda, we're marking it by asking our community to take on a challenge of their own. Trustee Rula Tripolitaki is swimming 12km in open water, one kilometre for every year of this work. Trustee Krystle McGilvery is painting twelve portraits over twelve weeks, each telling the story of a woman who's come through something hard. More challengers coming soon, fancy setting your own challenge?
Where to find us this quarter
14 October: Below the Waterline (curated by Antonia Pascal). Abi joins the panel on Safeguarding Girls and Young Women from Criminal Exploitation, alongside Nicky Hill (MOPAC), Josie Fergusson (Cranstoun) and Chloe Barlow (Home Office/UCL). It's part of a full-day conference at St Mary's University, Twickenham, hosted by the Bakhita Centre for Slavery, Safety & Social Justice and the National County Lines Coordination Centre, bringing together policing, academia and frontline practice on a collective response to criminal exploitation. Book tickets.
14 October: Violence Against Women and Girls Conference 2026: Delivering the National Strategy: Alex McKell, our Training and Development Lead, joins education professionals and the wider children's workforce to explore early intervention, healthy relationships, and challenging harmful behaviour before it escalates. Book tickets
16th –17th November (Manchester) / 18th–19th November (London): The Restoration Revolution: Oasis and SHiFT bring people together to build a new Manifesto for Justice, with speakers including Father Gregory Boyle and Jacob Dunne. Abi will be speaking too, on Participation is Protection, twelve years of learning about why involving young women in decisions about their own safety makes safeguarding more effective, not less. Manchester tickets · London tickets
26th November: Tackling Child Criminal Exploitation Digital Conference (Westminster Insight): Abi speaks on the risk-factors and realities of criminal exploitation of young women and girls. Book tickets
Also worth your time
Britain's Forgotten Girls, the documentary we contributed to, made by Alessia Camoirano Bruges, has had a powerful national response since release; watch it if you haven't.
Prof. Carlene Firmin's new book, Beyond Risk in Adolescent Safeguarding, lands 6th October from Policy Press, extending the thinking that's shaped this whole quarter's newsletter.
Agenda Alliance's Young Women's Justice Project is compiling data on young women aged 17–25 in the criminal justice system, a group they describe as an "invisible minority" in national data. Join Agenda Alliance at the North East roundtable on 19th October for practitioners working with this group.
Research in Practice, home of Dez Holmes's original transitional safeguarding work, is running a survey and focus groups on how care experience as a protected characteristic is actually playing out locally, open to practitioners across any sector. Survey closes 21st October.
Quietly in the background, we're deepening relationships across the systems either side of a young woman's transition, the Youth Justice Board's Girls Working Group, and a wide spread of housing conversations: associations, consultants, ASB teams, local authority housing. Different parts of the same puzzle.
