By Liz Mair, Chair of CFF
One of the positive things about lockdown is that I have made a new friend. Bryan is in his eighties and lives in a nearby village. I heard from a neighbour that he has an interest in researching families, so I asked him to look into mine.

​I could tell you lots about various family members from my past: northern industrialists; a wayward vicar; welsh builders; post office officials and small babies who died too young; but today is the turn of Samuel Smiles. 

We’re good at talking and listening, we do a lot of that with the families we work with every day. So when it came to defining our future brand vision we started talking and listening to the people who make CFF a family of committed, like-minded and passionate people…our team, our directors and families’ comments all have helped shaped our next phase.

Our original principles, established when we started out back in 1990, remain our guiding light, but as the world changes and evolves so have we. ​

Embracing our arty selves was the order of the day when we were joined by mental health nurse / poet / comedian, Rob Gee who helped us to write a collective poem about CFF! A fast paced and fun experience - see what you think! 

This time last year we were talking about how we were going to celebrate our 30th anniversary, bringing people together to share stories, experiences and look to the future. 

The pandemic and lockdown meant that we weren't able to bring people together in the way we had hoped. Instead, we planted 30 commemorative oak trees and our team came together on Zoom to show their 'gifts of kindness' - poems, art and crafts which will go on display in the training room at CFF. As you can see - there's lots of hidden talents amongst the team! 

Poems were also popular...

CFF celebrated it's 30th anniversary in 2020. As part of our celebrations we asked David Neville, a founder and current board director, to reflect back on why our core values and programme design remain relevant. 
 
The Centre for Fun and Families started running group work programmes in 1990 in the rural area of South Leicestershire. The original group work programme had the following characteristics: they were run predominantly in rural areas and the participants were mainly white. There was only one group work programme referred to as a “Fun and Families Group”, catering mainly for parents of children aged under 10 years of age.
 
In the last 30 years many quite dramatic changes have taken place, partly due to parental choice and partly due to major changes in society generally. These changes have included:-

• The need to offer programmes to families in inner city areas of Leicester and Leicestershire and to parents from a diverse range of ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds
• The need to offer group work programmes to parents of teenagers and also to teenagers themselves.
• The need to focus the groups for teenagers on wider issues than just behaviour. This would include subjects such as anxiety, resilience and general mental wellbeing.
• A major social change has been the dramatic growth of the use of new technology and the associated availability of social media and online information.

Our 2019-20 Annual Report gives you an overview of our work - what's been our focus for the year, who we have helped and how we have been funded. 

The Annual Report was signed off at our Annual General Meeting in November. You can read about it here.