Sister Lynda Dearlove receives MBE
01 January 2010
LYNDA
Congratulations to Sister Lynda Dearlove rsm who has been awarded the MBE in the New Years Honours List. This award is in recognition of over twenty years work on behalf of vulnerable and disadvantaged women.
Lynda was born in Middlesbrough on 7th January 1958, was educated in St. Joseph’s RC Primary School and at St. Mary’s FCJ Convent School. She gained her first degree in Microbiology at Kent University and followed this with Social Policy Administration at Lancaster. She joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, Endsleigh, (Middlesbrough group) just as it was merging with twenty other Mercy Congregations to form The Institute of Our Lady of Mercy. After the Novitiate period she worked in a pastoral role in Orchard Park, Middlesbrough before making Final Vows in 1989. It was during this period that she first became involved with women caught up in street based prostitution.
Lynda is not the docile, quietly spoken, demure nun of the popular image of religious women. She is a large woman in every sense: a huge personality, big hearted, compassionate, tender and strong with a passion for justice: a person to be reckoned with in the face of discrimination and injustice.
Whilst managing The Dellow Day Centre, Providence Row, East London she began working in a more sustained way with women involved in street based prostitution and her vision for a more holistic approach to their problems began to develop. Lynda has a gift for networking, collaboration and working in partnerships and a belief that the impossible is always possible!
Armed with a dream and a vision she approached the Trustees of the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy in 2006 with the request to purchase a property in London which could be a prototype for the empowerment of women.
She argued her case with eloquence, passion and practical detail and was invited to come back with a strategic plan. This was duly done and the search was on for a suitable property. Enabled by our business advisors JTS Partnership, a suitable property was found in the Kings Cross area of London with a price tag way beyond original estimates! It was purchased and the Charity women@thewell was in embryonic existence!
The vision behind women @ the well is to empower women, trafficked or caught up in the many facets of pavement culture i.e. homelessness, prostitution, drugs, alcohol, violence, physical and mental ill health to successfully rejoin society. These women are often kept locked into chaos by the complexity of services. Through providing on site the services of a doctor, solicitor, social workers, counsellors, therapists and a range of activities in art, music, cookery, education and spirituality, women are enabled to find a way forward, and develop talents and skills they never knew they possessed, improve their self image and dignity and in due course find a fulfilling role in society .
women@the well, operational since Autumn 2007was formally established and recognised as an independent Charity in 2008. It works in partnership with the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy and the National Board of Catholic Woman and networks with many Charities and organisations with similar aims and objectives. Many talented women, among them, members of a number of Religious Congregations, are involved as volunteers.
Helen Mirren, Helena Kennedy and Shelagh Foggarty
Lynda’s involvement in the empowerment of vulnerable and disadvantaged women, as noted earlier, spans almost thirty years.
As well as Directing women@thewell she remains actively engaged in working for the empowerment of women in the national and international arena. She travelled to the Vatican at the end of September 2009, to represent the Bishops Conference of England and Wales at the “First European Conference on the People of the Street” and to Geneva at the end of October to attend the NGO Conference to prepare for Beijing+15. In between this she presented a paper on "Bridging the gap between Policy and Practice" at an International Mercy Conference organised by 'Mercy Global Concern,' the International NGO which represents Worldwide Mercy at the UN in New York in the middle of October.
Lynda is a trustee of the National Alliance of Women’s Organisation’s (NAWO) and through them links on behalf of the women of England with the European Women’s Lobby. She is an active member of WNC’s (Women’s National Commission) and sits on the Violence Against Women Working Group, their International Advisory Group and the Olympics Working Group. She works directly with the Social Responsibility Working Group of the National Board of Catholic Women and often brings information to them from the other arena’s in which she works. As you can see she is certainly 'mobile for Mercy,' working actively at local, national, EU and UN levels to raise awareness of women’s issues and to lobby governments and international institutions.L
