We do not deliver the Own My Life course to women, we train practitioners within local services to run the course. This is because we believe that local services are best placed to support you. CLICK HERE to access the "Find A Course" page, and you can then contact your local organisation. Many organisations are running the course online, so if you can't find one that local to you, do contact your nearest course as they may be able to include you in an online course.

This will depend on the policy of the organisation running the Own My Life course that you attend. Our guidance to services running the course is that women can attend in-person/on-site courses if they are still with their partner, but if women are joining an online course, they need to have separated from their partner. This is because there are different safeguarding considerations when running the course online.

In Summer 2022, we introduced our Expectations of Sisterhood which all new facilitators and organisations are required to adhere to when delivering the Own My Life course. If you feel a course you are attending is not being run in ways outlined in the Expectations of Sisterhood, please contact us on info@ownmylifecourse.org and we can find a way to support those running your course to be aligned with our expectations of sisterhood.

While our materials are generally focussed on women who have been subjected to abuse by men, we have some materials which are focussed on the ways lesbian or bisexual women may be abused by a female partner. Our organisational model is that we deliver train-the-trainer courses for facilitators, with local organisations delivering the course. As a result of this, it would be the organisation running Own My Life who would be best placed to tell you whether you will find their courses able to fully support your needs. You can find the nearest organisations to you that run Own My Life HERE.

We regularly announce new training via our mailing list, which you can join by CLICKING HERE.

Yes! You'll find us on the CPD website HERE. Our training gives you accredited CPD hours.

Absolutely not! We know you're probably thinking that is what our answer would be, but we can assure you the training is highly engaging and transformative. Lots of practitioners join our training dreading five days online, but by the end of the week they tell us that it's been brilliant, energising and has kept their attention. We promise that our training will definitely not be "death by powerpoint".

We think courses like the Freedom Programme, Recovery Toolkit, Power To Change and others are doing a great job to enable women to move forward in their lives! We developed the Own My Life course to take women and practitioners further, to offer fresh perspectives and literacy about the latest research on trauma and abuse. We use lots of multimedia content, and while some organisations use the Own My Life course to complement their existing group work, others have been so excited about the Own My Life course that they have started solely using our course.

We don't want to create extra work for practitioners who are facilitating the course, so we don't require them to tell us exactly how many women have accessed the course. So far we have trained over 1000 Own My Life facilitators across the UK, Ireland and the Isle of Man. Each woman who participates in the course needs an Own My Story journal and by July 2023 we had provided over 9000 journals to organisations across the UK and Ireland. You can read more about the impact of the course on women's lives HERE.

Our training is incredibly successful at equipping practitioners to deliver the course well, with the course materials comprehensively covering all aspects of facilitation. Our guidance includes insisting that all facilitators have regular supervision and we offer group reflective practice sessions for facilitators. We provide regular updates to facilitators about the course content and require all those who are delivering the course to do so within an organisational contect that has appropriate safeguards to ensure the course is delivered to a high standard.

As a new charity we are excited to have such experienced and skilled trustees who are a diverse group of women. When we need to recruit further trustees our policy is to ensure a diversity of skills and experiences are represented across our trustee board.

Once trained, you can definitely use Own My Life material from our course in one-to-one work with women! THIS video tells you more about what women can expect to get from your work with them using the course materials, and THIS video, while focussed more on the group work aspect explains what our training involves. Although our Impact Reports (found HERE) evidence the impact of our group work course with women, women generally report that many of these benefits are still found when accessing the course one-to-one with a worker. Practitioners who come on our training report that it is transformative for their overall practice and is much more holistic than solely enabling them to run the course with women. You can read more about this in Impact Reports and also within THIS Evaluation Report.

Some Own My Life facilitators speak mulitple languages and so can offer the course in those languages. At present our materials are available in English and Welsh. We can keen to see our materials translated into different languages, but the cost of this (per language) is around £9000. We would love to partner with organisations and individuals who may be interested in supporting materials translation through funding or gifts in kind.