How Kids in the Middle started

Duncan Fisher, project lead, writes about creating something from a standing start.

The idea of creating a website for children and young people in separating families came about because a couple of sites were created in USA at the same time as three were closed down in UK.

But it quickly became obvious that it was going to be a challenge, because nobody was interested to fund the start-up. We approached all the major children’s charities but they did not reply. We wrote to about 20 celebrities but they did not want to help either. We made 20 funding applications and raised only about £3000! If we were going to rise to this challenge, then clearly the only way was a grass roots approach.

First I approached two local schools: Hereford Cathedral School and Crickhowell High School. The head teachers agreed to fundraising campaigns and, during 2013, 20 young people raised £15,000. This was a great start – not enough to launch, but it did mean we had to succeed! During these campaigns, one local law firm got in contact to express interest in joining the campaign. That gave us an idea and a year later no less than 40 law firms wanted to raise money, some in partnership with local schools.

During 2014 we made a breakthrough. We met with the charity, BeatBullying Group, which has built a sophisticated on-line peer support system for young people for a new website of theirs, mindfull.org. We agreed a partnership whereby their system would plug into the back of our website. This brought the cost of delivering a full service tumbling down. And that meant suddenly we had enough money to launch. We saved even more time and money by asking BeatBullying to do the design work for our website, based on all their research and experience of what works.

All through this we have been communicating constantly with family law and mediation firms and building up awareness of the project with the help of their national association, Resolution. Momentum is building all the time. More schools are showing interest. And now that this site actually exists, we think it will be easier to raise funds – we have lots of ideas for new things we want to build.

The key to being sustainable is for a regular income to cover all running costs. We have worked hard to keep running costs down. We don’t have an office and much of our work is done by volunteers. And we are creating a membership for family lawyers and mediators. This means that all the money raised by campaigns can be spent directly on new developments.

So we are over the first hurdle and the rest of our story lies before us!