About Contact a Family

When parents find out that their child is disabled they feel isolated and alone because they usually don’t know anyone else facing the same problems. They have two needs: firstly, contact with another family who’ve been through a similar experience; and secondly, they want information about their child’s condition.

In relation to that first need, Contact a Family aims to do exactly what it says on the tin – we enable parents to get in contact with other families. This may be on a local basis where the children have different conditions but face broadly the same problems in terms of education and facilities etc. It can also be on a national basis where, for example, we link a family in Cornwall with one in Scotland who have a child with exactly the same condition.

We also encourage families to come together and set up support groups. We are at the centre of a network of over 1,000 local groups and 350 national groups. We also have over 120 staff and volunteers throughout the UK and have offices in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Birmingham and London.

The second need for parents is information, initially about the medical condition that affects their child. Information from doctors tends to be either verbal (and thus difficult to take in when you’re distressed) or copied from a medical text book (and thus difficult to understand). We publish a Directory covering over 900 disorders, many of them rare syndromes and each entry is written by the UK’s leading expert on that particular condition but in a parent-friendly style. This same information is also on our award winning website which gets over 1.5m visits per year.

Parents also want information on issues as diverse as: how to juggle caring for a disabled child and hold down a job; and how to prevent non-disabled siblings from feeling left out. Contact a Family runs a freephone helpline providing advice and information on these issues together with a listening ear to parents and families who have recently discovered that their child has a disability or rare disorder.

Together with answering the parents’ needs for contact and information we also make sure that the needs of the disabled children themselves are satisfied. We run weekend breaks and trips to cinemas, ten-pin bowling alleys and theme parks for thousands of children across the UK every year.

We could do more if we had the funds. Please help us raise money for disabled children and their families. Many thanks.