A cross-community family support programme set up by Quaker Service 40 years ago "in response to sectarian violence in north and west Belfast" is to end in December.
The service, which operates out of the Quaker Cottage on the Ballygomartin Road, has spent the last four decades providing services for mothers and their children.
Mothers who attend the programme are helped with a range of issues including abuse, alcoholism, anxiety, bereavement, depression, domestic violence, and parenting.
However, Quaker Service has now announced the programme will end in December.
According to a letter, signed by Elizabeth Dickson, chair of Quaker Service, which was posted on social media this week, in March this year, the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust "proposed a significant variation to the contract we had long held with them to support families at risk".
"The new work involved a move away from group work based at the cottage to individual home visits across Belfast for family support, effectively ending the use of the cottage as our centre.
"We felt this was not in keeping with our approach and were aware also that other agencies were already undertaking such work and were better resourced and staffed to do so."
Quaker Service said it decided to "not take up the contract" thus "our highly valued association with the trust, for the present, has come to an end".
However, the service said that despite the funding ending it "made a commitment to completing the work with three of the groups of women and their children who have embarked upon the programme at the cottage and will do so by December this year".
It said its board "set aside a significant sum of money from reserves to meet the immediate funding shortfall and steps were taken to save costs across the charity".
However, the service said in the last few months, it had seen its "projected deficit rise sharply amidst a lack of certainty over the future of the family programme" and as there is no funding secured to replace what has been lost, the programme "is no longer sustainable and that this work at the cottage should be laid down in December".
The service said it was "keenly aware of the direct impact that this decision will have on our staff" and the "sense of loss" there will be among the local community for whom the Quakers "have been such a source of care and support".
The service said its focus would now be on "the opportunity to develop our service and to fulfill our vision of enabling positive change".
