Bristol Churches City Fund: Child Welfare 2022
Watch the Child Welfare campaign video
Alongside food poverty, Child Welfare has been highlighted as a critical need across Bristol.
It is an accepted fact that the wellbeing of children and young people has been profoundly impacted as a result of the pandemic, and support is urgently needed – support that the Christian community is well-equipped to contribute to.
1) Fostering and Adoption: working with Home for Good
In recent years Christians from churches across the city have come forward to foster or adopt vulnerable children. At the beginning of the pandemic Bristol City Council issued an appeal for people to come forward for training as emergency foster carers to care for children who’s current foster carers were over 65 and therefore at risk from Covid.
The response to this appeal from the Christian community was extraordinary and has further cemented the churches’ relationship with the Council.
The need for people to volunteer and train as foster carers remains, and there is a call for the church in the city to support the work of Home for Good financially in coordinating this critically important work.
2) Supporting Children: working with Transforming Lives for Good
There are an increasing number of children across the city’s network of primary schools who struggle at school, for a range of reasons, and this can have a profound impact on their ability to learn and to develop emotionally.
Transforming Lives for Good (TLG) have developed a simple model of pairing an adult from a local church with a child, and for them to meet for an hour each week during term time over a full academic year – simply befriending, listening and supporting. The model has proven to be transformational for these children – and for the adults!
Bristol City Council has recognized the huge value of this simple approach, and the Director of Education has asked if local churches would be willing to partner with up to 20 schools across the city to provide teams of volunteers to befriend struggling children. This provides an amazing opportunity to support some of the most vulnerable children across the city, and to build strong relationships between churches and their local school / community. Funding is required to support the roll-out of this initiative, which is unique to Bristol.
Supporting Teenagers: working with Kintsugi Hope
Mental health and wellbeing is becoming a major challenge for people of all ages, and particularly for teenagers, exacerbated by the isolation that has arisen during the current pandemic.
National charity Kintsugi Hope, founded in recent years by Patrick and Diane Regan, seeks to encourage a more open conversation about the issue of mental health, using support groups (in person and online) to create the context for addressing some of the challenges. They have proven to be incredibly effective, and progress is now being made in setting up a number of support groups for teenagers / youth across the city. Experience to date has shown them to be incredibly beneficial.
Funding is required to support the ongoing roll-out of these groups, often working alongside local secondary schools and building these groups into the range of support provided to young people struggling with their mental health and wellbeing.
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