SAFE Associate – Yana Spencer
Yana’s approach to safeguarding training is informed by her international work with victims of gender-based violence. These first-hand experiences in 15 countries have given her a strong awareness of how equality and diversity issues impact on safeguarding.
Yana’s social enterprise, Tamu Bakery, empowers women and girls around the world affected by gender-based violence. Hand-in-hand with grassroots NGOs, she provides psycho-social training for survivors such as incest victims in Sri Lanka, sex-trafficked girls in Nepal and Vietnam and young Maasai women in Kenya who have suffered female genital mutilation and early forced marriage.
Originally a journalist in her native Ukraine, in 2008 Yana pivoted towards NGO project management, working on issues such as equality and diversity, mental health and gender.
As part of these roles, she acted as a trainer to partner organisations, delivering workshops on topics such as domestic violence in the migrant community and human trafficking for Devon and Cornwall Police, discrimination prevention for Cornwall Council, as well as induction programmes for volunteers at mental health charity Mind and the Cornwall Sexual Assault Referral Centre, and lecturing at schools and universities on sexual and gender-based violence issues.
Yana’s journalistic background means she has a refreshing approach and her workshops promise to be thought-provoking and skill-enhancing; anything but ‘death by PowerPoint’!