About Yemaya
We are a specialist family violence service providing medium to long-term counselling and support to women who are experiencing or have experienced intimate partner abuse. Also called domestic/family violence.
We provide a range of services including, one-on-one counselling and support, group programs, information, and referral. An important part of our work is to raise community awareness on the issue of intimate partner abuse. We believe when people live without violence, everyone has the opportunity to flourish and grow.
The service was established under the name Survivors Incorporated in December 1991. In 2004 we changed our name to Yemaya Women’s Support Service Inc. We changed our name because women who used our service at the time let us know they wanted to be acknowledged as survivors, but they also wanted to be more.
Yemaya is the Afro-Caribbean goddess, who has been defined as “…the guardian of mothers and children and those recovering from gendered violence”.
We are located at an address in the city to provide women with easy access to the service. Creating safety is an important part of our work with women who use the service; that’s why our address is highly confidential.
It is given only to women who contact the service and make an appointment and to other workers in referral services on a ‘need to know’ basis.
Funding for Yemaya is from the Communities Tasmania Family Violence Program.
We have had many achievements over the years and are proud of the work we have done and continue to do. Our most important achievements are usually those that no one but our clients can see. Those times when we have supported a woman through the impacts of abuse by an intimate partner and the associated trauma, so she can process and understand what has happened and move towards a future free from abuse. This is our core work, it is hidden and unseen but the most valuable.
Our work is varied and we work with women from where they are at, addressing experiences of abuse from the abusive behaviour of current or past partners, working to support them to stay safe, and encouraging new hopes and dreams.
Yemaya is the service it is because of the woman who comes to us for support. They are the ones who shape the way we work, and we are guided in our responses by their needs. We are privileged to be able to support women who have faced and are facing huge adversity.
