Our Partners

We Are Family (WAF) is an independent adoption support community that operates in and around London. Membership is free and open to adopters and approved prospective adopters. You can join here.  They run peer-to-peer (i.e. parent-to-parent) events such as parent support groups, playgroups, family meet-ups, parties and socials. They also provide many opportunities to connect online, such as local group meet-ups on Zoom, webinars, blogs, a private Facebook group and other member resources on their website. All events are designed and run by adopters, on a voluntary basis. Rather than offering advice, they offer community. They say it takes a village to raise a child. WAF wants to build those villages.

New Family Social is the only national LGBT+ adoption and fostering charity in the UK. It provides support, improves the treatment of LGBT+ people in the adoption and fostering process, encourages inclusion and works directly with its members and agencies to find more new families for children in care.

Adoption UK is the leading charity providing support, community and advocacy for all those parenting or supporting children who cannot live with their birth parents. They connect adoptive families, provide information and signposting on a range of adoption-related issues and campaign for improvements to adoption policy and legislation at the highest levels.

First4Adoption is the dedicated information service for people interested in adopting a child in England.  Consider also their First Steps online resource. It is a great tool to see how prepared and ready you are for an adoption assessment, that will help you understand the rewards and challenges of adoptive parenting.

The NATP provide support, training and advice to all families of children who have suffered developmental trauma. It is now run by staff who all have experience in child trauma, through either supporting traumatised children themselves or being a former child in care. The NATP provides a range of benefits such as Listening Circles, Peer support online and a members hotline .

PAC-UK provides an advice line for anyone affected by adoption, they also provide counselling services to birth families. They are an independent adoption support agency not just for the child, they also have extensive experience in all aspects of supporting the adoptive family and have specific expertise in providing assessments and therapeutic interventions to families whose children experienced developmental trauma prior to their adoption placement.

Kinship, formerly known as Grandparents Plus, offers services for any friend or family member raising a child full-time because their parents are unable to look after them – kinship carers – regardless of their legal order.  Kinship is the leading kinship care charity.  Most of the London boroughs within Adopt London are members of Kinship Membership (Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Enfield, Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham, Haringey, Hounslow, Islington, Newham, Southwark, Sutton, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth), which offers priority access to advice, regional virtual support groups, priority access to Kinship’s Someone Like Me telephone peer support service run by kinship carer volunteers and Facebook surgeries on issues such as benefits.  Some of these boroughs (Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Hounslow, Islington, Southwark, Sutton and Wandsworth) have also commissioned additional one-to-one support from a Kinship project worker.

Kinship Hub is a community based service that aims to support kinship carers across London. They offer free online webinars to kinship carers and children on a range of topics from managing contact safely, to promoting a positive sense of identity, life story work and building resilience.  Kinship Hub also delivers webinars and monthly online dinner socials for children and carers to get together in an informal but safe way and socialize.