Battle Scars is a community group providing support to anyone affected by self harm aiming to support, educate and bring everybody together. We have just applied for charitable status and hoping to be approved soon. Please check our Website out.

Based in Leeds, UK but provide on-line support worldwide. We mostly work with adults, parents and professionals with strong intentions to work directly with children.

We run 6 support groups (each runs every 4 weeks) around Leeds. 4 where everybody over 18 is welcome (people who self-harm, their family/friends/carers and professionals), and 2 specialised (for deaf women with Signhealth and for women with experience of the judiciary system with Together Women).

We’re growing very fast! We have no paid staff and all the funds benefit our service users. We’ve already had over 600 service users (excluding the 630 members of our Facebook group) with high demand in and out of Leeds and our small team is struggling to cope. We have a lot of people who want to volunteer with us, who believe in what we do. So we're setting up a volunteer development programme to empower our volunteers by giving them purpose. We want to do it right and fully support these people who want to freely give their time. We have a different approach: we attract the volunteers and create appropriate roles for them. Nobody is fitted into a box!

We need funds to provide training to these volunteers and cover their expenses. With training and support we will help increase their skills, their confidence and self esteem.

The need is great and so are our plans for more services (including a counselling drop-in centre) as well as expansion out of Leeds.

We are well known within the mental health services and we work together with them, as well as other NHS services, and a large number of voluntary sector organisations. Our training for professionals is proving very popular which is why we have dropped the crowdfunding amount significantly.

If you can donate even a tiny amount, it would be extremely helpful (you can donate anonymously too). With your help we’ll reach more and more people and break down the stigma around self-harm.

Thank you!