Mark Williams from Fathers Reaching Out. In 2004 Mark experienced depression and suffered for years until he had a breakdown.  He founded International Fathers’ Mental Health Day and #Howareyoudad campaign which makes sure that the whole family is getting support.  Claire connected with Mark on Twitter when researching Dads and Post Natal Depression (PND) and we thought that it would be really interesting to get to know him a bit better.  

Twins Trust’s Bereavement Support Group offers a safe space for parents to talk to someone that has sadly been through the same experience of bereavement following the death of one or more of their children. Sharon is the first point of contact for parents and carers who get in touch. We met up with Sharon at the Twins Trust Volunteer day in March and talked to her about the important role that the group plays for bereaved parents.

Natalie Costa (@powerthoughtsnc on Instagram powerthoughts.co.uk) Power Thoughts is a teaching, coaching and mindfulness based service which is aimed at empowering children to tap into the ‘power’ of their minds.  Children are taught how to become confident, resilient and robust, developing a ‘can-do’ attitude that allows them to flourish both in and out of the classroom setting. 

Emma–Jane is a specialist women’s health physiotherapist she assesses and treats a range of conditions and is also a Mummy MOT practitioner. We talked to her about why it is as important to look after yourself as it is to look after your baby.

Pippa has always worked in health, fitness and wellbeing – she's been a gym instructor, group exercise teacher, trainer, assessor and quality assurer. More recently she had a full-time career developing health and fitness qualifications. In 2017 she decided to follow her dream of setting up Press Pause to share yoga and mindfulness to families, children, young people and adults.

We spoke to Rebecca to find out about her career as well as her inspiration for setting up London’s Little Thinkers, an online community which shares educational and engaging ideas for ‘London’s Little Thinkers’!

We at Bespoke Family have been lucky enough to experience some Dazzle and Fizz Children’s parties first hand and they are nothing short of incredible.  We spoke to Charlotte to find out more about everything she has achieved after setting the business up when she was just 24, where the inspiration comes from for all of these amazing themed parties and how she manages to always exceed the brief!

The charity BRAAIN , an invaluable resource for parents and carers of children with ASD and ADHD, was set up in October 2017. We met Nikki at her day job as Head of Communications at Tamba (The Twins and Multiple Births Association) and were so inspired by her we wanted to know more about why and how she had set up BRAAIN. Here Nikki explains how it all came about:

“I met Emma at a positive parenting Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) course. After chatting about the lack of support for families with children with special needs in the area, we decided to set up Time Out Support Group. At one of the first few sessions, Helen offered to help with the group. We had already discovered that there was a huge need for greater support for parents, so decided to expand the support group and developed BRAAIN.” 

Following our series of blogs on sleep we thought it would be interesting to get to know a bit more about Vicki and the invaluable work she does with The Children’s Sleep Charity. 

We first met Simon at the Twins and Multiple Births Association volunteer day where he gave a talk about his and his husband’s journey towards becoming parents to twins by surrogacy.  His talk was informative, sensitive and funny all at the same time and we wanted to get to know Simon a bit better.  We hope you find our chat with him as interesting as we did...