WIRE - Women in Recovery & Empowerment support women in recovery from trauma-based addiction, by promoting personal growth and recovery through their connection with the land, each other, and themselves.

 

The women are offered opportunities to grow, harvest, and cook food, participate in the rewilding project on the farm; as well as learning traditional crafts in willow weaving, foraging, preserving, pickling fruit & vegetables and herbalism.

 

The project is delivered through a two-stage model of tried and tested activities:

 

1.            Creating opportunities for women to be deeply connected to nature, through growing and creative activities, working collectively to recover the land.

 

2.            Providing learning, supported volunteering opportunities and external training to increase women’s potential for meaningful employment.

 

As the project has developed, women achieving stable recovery have taken up more responsible roles on the farm., developing a  market-garden and a mobile horse-box shop. 

 

WIRE fills a gap in services for women in trauma-based addiction. Our solution deliberately falls outside of a traditional ‘fix the problem’ model. Instead, women can navigate their own recovery journeys by having access to support for self-empowerment.

 

WiRE collaborates with a wider network of women’s community groups and recovery organisations in County Durham and across the North East.