By LMK Co-Founder, Kirsten Westlake
Did you know that at least 1 in 5 adults in the UK will experience domestic abuse during their lifetime? (NCDV)
While many organisations work tirelessly to help survivors of domestic abuse rebuild their lives, far fewer focus on preventing that abuse before it begins.
LMK (Let Me Know) is a young charity with a big mission: to provide young people with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in their relationships. This means teaching them to recognise the warning signs of unhealthy relationships and how to leave those relationships safely, before abuse escalates. At LMK, we believe education is the key to prevention. And that through education, we can help create a world in which relationship abuse, domestic violence and sexual assault no longer exist.
To kick off our Big Give campaign, launching tomorrow (Tuesday 3 December 2024), Co-Founder Kirsten Westlake talks about LMK – our mission, where we’re heading and where it all began.
The seeds of an idea
The aim of stopping relationship abuse before it starts was the driving goal behind myself and my co-founder setting up LMK. In mid 2019, we began to explore what interventions could work. We were inspired by the 10 Signs of Healthy and Unhealthy Relationships, a framework developed by Johns Hopkins University and successfully used by the One Love Foundation in the United States with over a million young people. Could we learn from this amazing programme, and create something that would have the same impact for young people in the UK?
We were proud to gain charitable status in September 2020. Like so many other charities, the Covid-19 pandemic threw us an unexpected curveball, but in our first year, we still managed to work with 1,000 young people. Most importantly, we received an overwhelmingly positive response from both the young people who took part in our workshops and from educators and youth work professionals working with them. All this confirmed what we had suspected when we began our work: LMK was addressing a critical gap.
Growth and impact
In 2021, the issue of relationship abuse rose to the top of the news agenda. The rise in domestic violence during lockdown, the harrowing testimonies shared by survivors on platforms like Everyone’s Invited, and Ofsted’s review of sexual abuse in schools, highlighted the urgent need for change. With our core programme up and running, LMK was well positioned to respond. We expanded our workshops to new schools and new community settings, and began work to refine our programmes to address the issues young people were facing online, introducing modules on sharing intimate images, and the impact of social media and pornography on relationships. We set up our Youth Advisory Board to help guide and co-design our work. And we developed workshops tailored for young people with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) and training for adults working with young people.
By the end of 2023, LMK had worked with nearly 10,000 young people across London. This was an important milestone for us and signalled the start of a transition away from being a start-up towards becoming an ambitious, fast-growing, established charity. We hired our first CEO and launched our first formal strategy, which reaffirms our commitment to reaching those young people that we know are at greatest risk of abuse, to building deeper connections with young people beyond workshops, and to collaborating creatively with other organisations that share our aim to help young people.
Looking Ahead
The devastating effects of relationship abuse and domestic violence are still all too apparent in 2024. Amid the turbulence of global conflicts and economic pressures, the charity has continued to strengthen its programmes and to grow: extending further across London, as well as into primary schools, universities and workplaces. We have now worked with over 15,000 young people, and during 2023-24, 72% said the LMK workshop changed their understanding of healthy relationships.
This amazing achievement is thanks to the tireless efforts of our team and our wider network of volunteers, funders and friends. Together, we are working hard to deliver more workshops and resources than ever, to reach even more young people, and to work with more brilliant partners. By doing this, we are addressing the root causes of abuse, and doing our part to create a safer society. We believe that together, we can build a future free from relationship abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault.
We invite you to join us on this journey. Stand with LMK and be part of the change our society urgently needs.
By Kirsten Westlake, Co-Founder of LMK
Learn more about our work and support us by visiting lmkletmeknow.org. Or, if you’d like to make a donation between 3 and 10 December, good news, your donation will be DOUBLED via our Big Give Campaign page. Together, we can stop relationship abuse before it begins.