Success stories

With your support, we can offer a lifeline to the most vulnerable children and young people across the UK. Below you can watch and read two stories which show our success.

Louise's story

When Louise arrived at the children's centre, she was in floods of tears. She was convinced that Ella - her five-year-old daughter - was going to be taken away from her and put into care. And she thought that there was nothing she could do about it.

The start of the cycle…

Louise grew up in a world that few of us can imagine. She was physically abused by her father and her mother was an alcoholic. So for as long as she can remember, Louise had to fend for herself. There was rarely food in the house and Louise and her brother would steal sweets from local shops - so the police knew her from an early age.

To Louise, school was torture. The teachers didn't seem to have a clue what her life was like. They picked on her and made her life miserable. As for the other kids, well Louise was a 'slag'. Louise smelled. Louise got her best clothes at Oxfam. Louise was a 'retard'. Louise was an object of hate. Always alone. Always excluded.

It made her angry. And that anger was made worse by the fact that underneath it was envy and despair that everyone else had a home and a normal mum and a dad who didn't hit them and food in the fridge and the stuff they needed for school and, well, everything.

Unsurprisingly, Louise didn't do well at school. She left at sixteen although she stopped turning up almost two years earlier. After that, she just hung around the estate with other kids who had been pushed out onto the margins. She felt lonely and she felt threatened a lot of the time so there were lots of boyfriends. But most of them made her feel more lonely than she had before. A few made her feel more threatened.

A miracle

When she was nineteen, something wonderful happened to Louise. A baby girl called Ella. Her dad didn't stick around long. Louise was glad. He changed as soon as she got pregnant. He tried to make her have an abortion. He screamed at her. He beat her up so badly she thought she'd miscarry. And then he just walked away. But if she put his name on the birth certificate, he'd kill them both.

But Louise had her precious baby girl and suddenly all the bad stuff in the world seemed to recede a bit. Like someone turned the volume down. She knew that people looked down on her and called her a slag and a benefit bunny. But she didn't care because she had Ella and Ella wasn't going to live the life she had. Ella was going to have new clothes and go to school and have stories at bedtime and nobody was going to hurt her. Ever.

Struggle

Louise got a flat from the council. She applied to go to college but she never quite made it. It was all she could do to cope with Ella. Because Ella didn't come with instructions and she couldn't really read the leaflets that the health visitor gave her. Even worse, Louise didn't really know what she was meant to be doing. Nobody had ever looked after her. Her mum didn't want to know and there was nobody who would tell her what to do. So most of the time Louise stayed in the flat.

Crisis

A week after Ella's fifth birthday, Louise couldn't get out of bed. She was sick. A lot. And then things got really bad.

It turned out that she had glandular fever but for two weeks she didn't leave the flat. When she felt a little better she still didn't leave the flat because she felt so sad all the time. That turned out to be depression but Louise didn't know any of this stuff. She just hid under the duvet.

When the food ran out, Louise sent Ella down in the lift to the café across the road to buy crisps. And when mummy didn't give her money, Ella would go to the café anyway and take the sachets of sugar off the tables. The staff didn't know that was her breakfast. They just smiled.

Ella didn't like living like this. She screamed. She shouted. She made a mess. She weed on the floor and mummy didn't clear it up. She cried and mummy didn't care.

In the space of a month, the fragile life that Louise had struggled for four years to maintain fell apart. And when social services came knocking for a routine inspection, they didn't like what they saw.

A second chance

Thankfully, social services weren't quite the bogeymen that Louise thought and they sent her to Action for Children's family centre. And as suddenly as life had unravelled, it started to come together again.

For a start, the centre was a safe, happy, light place. It had a garden. It had apples in a bowl and soap in the bathroom and a washing machine that worked. It was everything that the flat wasn't and Louise and Ella loved it.

Even better, the centre was full of people who knew what to do. They knew what time Ella should go to bed. They knew what she should read and what she should eat and how she could get a place at school and everything. So all of a sudden, Louise went from having nobody to tell her what she needed to know to having an army of people who cared about her and wanted to help and could help.

Staff went to her house. They helped her clean up - even though they didn't have to. They did it because they wanted to. Louise could hardly believe it. They loaned her some toys that she could never have afforded and they got Ella a nursery place that Louise didn't have to pay for.

For the first time in her life, Louise felt like she had a family. She had people around her who expected her to do well and to be a good mum. So she did. She made it to college. She painted the flat. And she started to feel that she'd be able to offer her daughter the life she had always dreamed of.