Soooo... running the London Marathon in wellies... it's a bit of a long story but the most important thing is who I'm raising money for-

For just over a year I have been working for a wonderful UK wide charity called Safe Families. I have seen first hand how so many families are going through tough times. Sometimes it's because of abuse, relationship breakdown, serious illness. Sometimes it's more simple like moving to a new area and without community around them things get tough. Safe Families believe that no one should feel alone. Our main source of support is through our team of amazing trained volunteers (5000+ across the UK and 120+ in Swindon.) Every family is different so how we support is different. 

A volunteer may meet up with an overwhelmed mum for a couple of hours fortnightly so that she can talk through the challenges of looking after her child with additional needs, giving her the space to process all the meetings and feelings that she is experiencing. Another volunteer may look after children whilst an exhausted dad gets on with paperwork or attends counselling. Volunteers may look after children overnight whilst mum, who has no one else to ask, goes to hospital to give birth. Without Safe Families input these situations would have looked very different. The mum may have experienced mental health issues caused by compassion fatigue, the dad may not have been able to submit key paperwork leading to increased debt and the children of the last family may have gone in temporary foster care, potentially split up and causing trauma. 

There is a quote by Desmond Tutu which is shared at the beginning of the volunteer training- "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in." We want to support families before they get to crisis point, before they experience more trauma and before families are torn apart. By doing this we are not only helping to save families but we are also able to save local councils money by preventing escalation into statutory children's services.

There are many ways that you can support the work of Safe Families-

Volunteer- Can you support someone in your local community? Look at our website for more information.
Give- If you can't volunteer but still want to support us then you can donate money to our work. The bulk of our finances come from Local Authorities but we are seeing more how budgets are being squeezed so contracts are being put at risk.
Pray- We are a Christian organisation, if you are a praying person then please sign up for our regular prayer letter.