The Tees Valley Women’s Centre is a crucial lifeline for local women and families.
On a quiet street in Middlesbrough, life-changing work happens every single day and for thousands of women across our region, it has been a place of safety, dignity and second chances.
Tees Valley Women’s Centre has spent more than four decades supporting women who are navigating some of the most complex challenges life can throw at them. Poverty, domestic abuse, mental ill health, addiction, homelessness, involvement with the criminal justice system. Often not one of these on its own, but several at once.
What makes the Centre distinctive is not just the breadth of support it offers, but how it offers it.
This is a women-only space, designed around trust and understanding. Many of the women who walk through its doors have experienced trauma, judgement, or systems that felt cold and inflexible. Here, the approach is different. Support is holistic, practical and rooted in respect. Women are met as people first, not problems to be fixed.
The Centre provides specialist services around domestic abuse, mental health and wellbeing, substance misuse, and support for women affected by the criminal justice system. There is also help with education, training, employment skills and financial resilience. For some women, this might mean support filling in forms or attending appointments. For others, it’s about rebuilding confidence after years of being told they don’t matter.
Crucially, the work doesn’t happen in isolation. Tees Valley Women’s Centre collaborates with local authorities, health services, probation teams and community organisations to make sure women aren’t falling through the gaps. In a system that often expects people to be “fixed” before they can be helped, the Centre works the other way around. Support comes first. Stability grows from there.
The impact is profound. Women who once felt stuck or invisible begin to regain control over their lives. Relationships with children are repaired. Cycles of crisis are interrupted. Futures that once felt closed off start to open again.
At a time when funding pressures and rising need continue to stretch local services, the Centre’s role has never been more important. The cost of not providing this kind of support is far greater, both in human terms and for the wider community.
Tees Valley Women’s Centre stands as a reminder that compassionate, locally rooted support works. Not because it offers easy answers, but because it stays with people for the long haul.
For many women across Teesside, it has been the difference between surviving and finally being able to move forward.
