The Official Opening of My Sisters’ House’s New Women’s Centre and Fifth Anniversary Celebration

With Dame Julie Walters

Images by Kate Henwood

Five years. A lot can happen in five years, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days. In five years your hair can grow thirty inches. You’ll have spent approximately two years sleeping, half of a year trying to sleep, and almost a whole year wishing you could be sleeping (while instead working). Two trillion tons of ice will have melted from the polar ice caps, and we’ll have lost up to point five percent of animal species.

In five years you’ll have loved, learned, and lost. Maybe you’ll have made a new friend, changed jobs, or moved house once or twice.

For My Sisters’ House the above is true. Jo, Jan, Katie, and Caroline have become close friends from their joint work with Step Forward. Everyone in the MSH team left their previous jobs to pull up seats around the kitchen table, with the most recent member, Fiona, joining a matter of months ago. And the centre has moved five times. From Julie Budge’s kitchen, Clock walk (and everything in between), to 108b and c London Road, at the official opening of My Sisters’ House’s new women’s centre in Bognor Regis. All of this has happened in the space of just five years.

This, and the opening of My Sisters’ House’s new home, is what we celebrated on Friday 16th August 2019.

As I walked into the centre on the afternoon of the 16th I was surrounded by white light that was illuminating off of the laminate floor. The room was bright and spacious, its walls lined with purple tables spread with vases of flowers, donation buckets, and a large, fondant-finished cake courtesy of Crafty Cakes Bognor. On the right, a rectangle plaque was concealed under purple curtains.

The doors through to the main hub revealed a second wide space decorated with swoops of yellow, gingham bunting. Posters with staff headshots and services information patchworked the brick walls opposite the fitted kitchen. Besides the new accessible toilet sat a table scattered with handmade hearts and cards.

People flowed through the centre, passing the brick archway that frames two private interview rooms (home to the infamous matching blue armchairs) as they moved upstairs. On the second-floor, tall posters detailing MSH’s journey filled the hallway that connects a line of offices. The final stop on the tour was the peer group room with a large, oval table purposing the space. On the back wall of the room a lilac print-out was pressed. It read, ‘Our Centre. A safe space for all women where we are treated with respect, compassion, empathy and without judgement.’

Viewing the new, complete centre, the changes My Sisters’ House have made over the past five years are notable. For one, for the first time in five years the MSH team can work in the same, shared space.

Back downstairs the hub was buzzing. Beyond the main members of the MSH team, the centre was busy with volunteers, clients, VIPs, and the bustle around our special celebrity guest, Dame Julie Walters.

Looking across the full room in the newly renovated centre, I asked Julie Budge, Founder and CEO of My Sisters’ House, where she’d envisioned she’d be five years after she first created the women’s centre. Julie paused in thought before replying, ‘I always had the vision for having a secure, operational women’s centre. It feels like it’s been a long journey, but we are here now.’

And who’d have imagined, five years on from the kitchen table, Dame Julie Walters dropping by My Sisters’ House for the day. On the centre Dame Julie Walters commented, ‘I think it’s wonderful that women can just walk in and there’s someone here, and that takes a lot of courage. But because of the way this place is and the energy and people who work here that makes it easier for them.’

As Dame Julie Walters fiddled with the cords to the curtains over the plaque she joked, ‘Pull the other one and the ceiling comes down!’ Over the laughter that filled the room, Julie declared My Sisters’ House’s new centre officially open, revealing the engraved plaque.

My Sisters’ House has helped more than eight hundred and fifty women in five years, with the average of three hundred women per year accessing MSH’s services increasing with every count. In five years My Sisters’ House has expanded from a small, kitchen table to two building’s worth of space and a team of fifteen paid staff, five free-lance workers, twenty-five volunteers, and one intern (that’s me).

Friday marked five years of sacrifice, strength, and sisterhood in the pursuit of supporting vulnerable women in the local community.

I’ve only been at My Sisters’ House for five weeks now, so I thought it best to leave the definitions of the team’s time at the women’s centre up to them.

At My Sisters’ House the last five years have been magical, life-changing, good for the soul, humbling, supportive, extraordinary, unexpected, phenomenal, and for Julie Budge, ‘Thankful.’

‘And,’ the last person I asked began. ‘This.’

I looked around the room at the women celebrating together. They were chatting, smiling, comforting, befriending, while sipping from mugs of tea (or champagne flutes), just like at My Sisters’ House’s first drop-in.  This is it, five years of My Sisters’ House.

So, everyone raise a hypothetical glass with me in celebration of My Sisters’ House’s new home. To five years of your stories, our support, My Sisters’ House, and to the next five to come *clink*.