Spurgeons Children’s Charity is set to deliver a new £2.5m Family Centre service in partnership with Surrey County Council in the borough of Elmbridge. A three-year contract, which may be extended for a further two years, has been awarded to…
Author: Lauren Baldridge
In praise of ‘angels’ in dark places
On the eve of Prisons Week (13-19 October), Spurgeons Chief Executive Ross Hendry invokes the compassion, hope and inclusiveness brought by those ‘angel’ volunteers in our prisons Prisons are not nice places. That may seem an obvious statement, but one…
Working with girls to BeLeave in better
Jag Basra heads Spurgeons’ BeLeave programme, supporting girls and young women impacted by gang affiliation and child criminal exploitation. Jag is about to meet up in Cape Town with all the projects established under the international Comic Relief I Define…
Are you sitting comfortably?
For the last two years or more Spurgeons family services worker Diane Sparkes has run a reading scheme that enables dads in Norwich prison to share bedtime stories with their children. The StoryBook Dads scheme is another example of Spurgeons’…
When a prison visit saw a father meet his children for the first and last time
In the latest of our blog series on the importance of supporting dads, a Spurgeons Family Support Worker tells their part in the story of how a final contact visit was arranged for a new father serving a prison sentence…
Awards success champions ‘the Spurgeons way’
With two projects both being shortlisted in two categories, Spurgeons has established a strong presence in this year’s Children & Young People Now Awards. The Saturdads group at Peterborough’s Honeyhill Children’s Centre, which celebrated its 10th Anniversary in August, is…
Lads Need Dads: Helping boys with absent fathers be the best that they can be
The latest blog in our ‘father to the fatherless’ series comes from guest blogger Sonia Shaljean. Sonia is founder and managing director of an Essex-based initiative that is getting national attention Founded in 2015 Lads Need Dads is an award-winning…
Celebrating a place where dads can be dads
For the latest in our summer blog series focused on the important role fathers play in children’s lives and the need to support dads, we asked Spurgeons Senior Early Years Practitioner Angie Lovell to tell us about Saturdads, as it…
Fatherhood today – a golden age or time of crisis?
Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy told Parliament, last month, that she had to choose between being an MP or a mother now that she was pregnant. This shone a bright light on the low take up (1% last year) of shared…
Brave Lesley still flying high for Spurgeons!
Former Spurgeons employee Lesley Blount went big with her celebrations to mark reaching 70 this year. Here Lesley blogs for us on her skydive from 10,000ft above Salisbury Plain, raising funds for Spurgeons and another charity close to her heart……