To meet the challenges posed by our mission to create an internet free from child sexual abuse, we’ve been growing the IWF, fast. I oversee the ‘engine room’ of the organisation – those many services which support the work of our core Hotline. To help us step up to the challenges of our mission, we need the right people with the right skills to perform those vital supporting roles.
Providing the right working environment for our growing team has been a big challenge this past year as our staff numbers have increased. Alongside that, it’s my responsibility to ensure that the welfare needs of all our staff are not just met but exceeded wherever possible. You can read more about our standout welfare challenges, and how we met these, here.
We’ve established our Fundraising Team – you can read more about their work here. It’s important that we diversify our income streams to ensure that the core work of our Hotline is firmly funded, and to enable us to take on those more bespoke projects with partners which help us in our work to create an internet free from child sexual abuse.
As a result of our successes in this area, we’ve expanded our Finance Team. Their work this past year has been outstanding, with our auditors proclaiming a completely clean audit – something we’ll be reporting on in our Trustees’ report due out this year.
IWF’s work has always been built on partnerships, and with an increased workforce, and a greater focus on creating new partnerships, we’ve brought our legal team in-house, and expanded it. Our work is unique; we are privileged to be trusted to proactively search for child sexual abuse material, and to store this imagery. This comes with great responsibility and our contracts and agreements are highly tailored to protect the data and imagery we gather and use as part of our mission.
Finally, our work would not be possible without our Members. More than 200 organisations help to fund our Hotline and take data sets and services to protect their own customers and users. Overseeing this vital work with both our existing Members and new prospective members falls to our excellent Development Team, whom I also have the pleasure of overseeing – you can read more about their year here.
I am proud to work with my teams and support our core Hotline, to ensure we meet the challenges now and in the coming years and meet our mission to create an internet free of child sexual abuse.