Partnerships and Policy

Nopa Foundation is deliberately small, and we intend to stay that way. The organisations that already run shelters and legal clinics are better at that work than we would be. What the field is short of is connective tissue, and that is what we choose to be.

In practice that means convening. We bring shelter managers, hospital social workers, police liaison officers, faith leaders and employers into the same room, which happens far less often than the public assumes. Each of them holds one part of a survivor's week. Very few of them have ever compared notes.

It also means training the referrers. Emergency department staff, ushers, HR managers and community elders are almost always the first to know something is wrong, and are almost never trained for it. A short, well designed session for those groups reaches more people than a year of general campaigning.

On policy we work through coalitions rather than alone. We contribute survivor testimony, gathered with consent, to consultations on protective orders, housing and funding for family violence services in Texas, and we support partner organisations in Southern Africa working toward the same ends under different law.

We are open about the fact that this is a long project. Prevalence has barely shifted in a decade, according to the WHO's own comparison of its 2013 and 2023 estimates. Nothing about that changes through good intentions. It changes through agreements between institutions that hold.