A 30-year-old domestic abuse charity is to close after a year-long fight to keep operating because of a “highly competitive” funding environment.

Vida Sheffield, which offers specialist trauma therapy to domestic abuse survivors, said it would close at the end of March, putting its five part-time core staff at risk of redundancy. 

The charity, which supports about 250 people per year, also contracts with about 12 associates to provide its therapeutic services, who will also be at risk of losing work. 

According to its most recent accounts filed with the Charity Commission, the charity recorded a total income of £214,130 and an expenditure of £213,399 in the year to the end of March 2023.

The charity said it needed to raise about £250,000 per year to maintain its services, but added this was “proving impossible to do because grant funding and donations have become so competitive in recent years”. 

The closure announcement came after a year-long effort to save the charity that was launched after it was unable to secure adequate funding.

Karen Hague, chief executive of Vida Sheffield, said: “We benefited from extra government funding through Covid and we also benefited from Ministry of Justice funding to support violence against women and girls services. But shortly after Covid was over all of that funding seemed to dry up.

“Last year we were very concerned after having tried to access some government funding and failed, so we put an alert out that we were struggling.”

She added that Vida Sheffield had been running all of the domestic abuse services in Sheffield for 30 years. But Hague said that as the charity began to focus on specialist areas, it had to rely on “highly competitive” grant funding rather than contracted funding.

Vida Sheffield launched a petition for emergency council funding in November last year, which was presented at a Sheffield City Council meeting on 15 July, containing nearly 27,500 signatures.

It has received public support from senior leaders in the council, South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, its local integrated care board, the domestic abuse commissioner, and the charity Women’s Aid.

But the charity has said it believes closure will be necessary at the end of March, despite the written and verbal support it has received.

Hague said: “To me, it feels like the tip of the iceberg. If Vida folds, there will be others that follow, because it’s hard to sustain critical services on piecemeal funding, without a promise of further support.”

She adds that this creates a “pressure point” for the women supported by the charity, saying: “Those women will go back to the NHS. There's always a couple of years-long waiting list for those specialist psychotherapy services and they have nowhere to go. So the worry is, what will they do? How desperate will they become?”