Blog: ‘We have the strength of a family. We are family’
A party, a cake and everyone being nice about you? Who doesn’t love a birthday?
Birthdays - and our charity’s 150th anniversary is a pretty special one - are also a chance to take a breath, however, and press pause, just for a moment. They are an opportunity to look back on how far we have come and ahead to where we want to go.
So this year is a special one for Aberlour. It is a milestone, of course, but a staging post too because, even after a century and a half, our journey is far from over.
Offering care, support and love to children in need was our mission when four little boys were given a home when they needed one in Speyside in 1875. Since then, what we do and how we do it has been transformed. Why we do it, to offer care, support and love to children in need, however, remains entirely unchanged.
Today, that first house is long gone and the orphanage too, closed in 1967. The charity that emerged from those homes is still here, however, and delivering life-changing, often life-saving, residential care and frontline services supporting children and their families across Scotland.
Aberlour is now one of Scotland’s most enduring, significant and impactful organisations in the Third Sector and across our public life. It has improved the lives and life chances of generations of children and this anniversary is a chance to remember our past, be inspired by it and learn from it too. Much of our history should be celebrated and all of it should be remembered.
Our mission is simple but the work we do, and have always done, to support disadvantaged children, is the opposite of easy. It is difficult, relentless and presents new challenges every day. Shirking those challenges not only fails children but their families and our communities.
Our ultimate ambition is, of course, to be no longer needed. To help build a country where children are protected, where safety nets are strong, secure and supported. We are, sadly, a long way from there. Scotland has far more children growing up in poverty than it should, far more families on the brink than it should, and far more children in care - and needing care - than it should.
Those children, their childhoods and their futures, are curtailed by poverty, their lives circumscribed by inequality. They are more likely to fail at school, their talents untapped and potential unfulfilled, end up in homeless accommodation or the criminal justice system, have poor health outcomes and shorter lives.
It is shameful that so little has changed since 1875, that, one of the wealthiest countries, in the world still struggles to protect its most vulnerable. Child poverty is not new and, when Canon Charles Jupp opened his orphanage for those “mitherless bairns” at Burnside Cottage, Aberlour, in March 1875, he was tackling exactly the same inequality, the same squandered potential, as we are today.
What has changed utterly is our knowledge and insight. We now know, with certainty, what will make most difference: parents having more money and the time and ability to build strong and stable relationships with their children. Sometimes, sadly, it just cannot be done but keeping families together wherever possible is always our priority.
Child poverty has, unfortunately, become a catch-all term for policy-makers, two little words that mean so much but, through over use, risk becoming empty shorthand for a crisis so huge and intractable that it is impossible to know where to start. Well, the scale of the crisis is certainly huge but it is absolutely tractable.
There are many pressing social issues including, but not limited to, ill health, mental illness, addiction, unemployment, low paid and uncertain work, poor housing and domestic violence. Poverty, however, underpins almost all of them, makes almost all of them worse, almost always impacting most on those with the least resource to defend themselves or their families.
We know more now. We know how to do things better. The changes made in the last 50 years have been transformational never mind the last 150. Our commitment to evolve, to engage with new research and to learn from best practice is one of our greatest strengths. We follow the evidence and, when the facts change, when our knowledge changes, we change too.
Many organisations are now acknowledging difficult and troubling aspects of their history. There is a lot to be proud of in our history but we must look back with clear eyes. Money from the slave trade helped pay for our first houses, for example, where, as recorded by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, a small number of staff betrayed the trust placed in them and the children they were meant to be caring for.
We have apologised unreservedly to the children failed then and are entirely committed to preventing the same failures now. This is an organisation unafraid to learn from its past, good and bad, but always with the ambition of improving the lives of children.
Closing the Aberlour Orphanage where 6850 children spent some of their childhood, up to 500 at a time, more than fifty years ago and beginning to open much smaller houses for children needing care is an obvious example.
The aim of creating a stable, family environment for children in need of residential care means our houses have become smaller and smaller again as the years pass. Today, we are moving to a model where there will be a maximum of four, more often three, children in our houses. The key is for them to build trust with the adults caring for them and, for that, smaller is better.
A focus on training and increasing staff’s specialist knowledge of child development and trauma is another example of our determination to improve and innovate. Across the Third Sector, Aberlour, with around 700 staff and 400 volunteers, is in the vanguard of change.
We move quickly and try things, with our services now ranging from ground-breaking Mother and Child Recovery Houses offering intensive support for new mums recovering from substance and alcohol problems to specialist support for survivors of domestic violence.
Other services help families secure financial stability offering specialist advice and support on debts and household budgets. Meanwhile, our Urgent Assistance Fund has, in recent years, rushed millions of pounds to families on the brink.
Across 150 years, our charity has shown it is unafraid of change and unafraid to raise the voice of children and young people. Today, that seems as important as it ever has been. There is an idea that charities, particularly supported by public money, have become more reluctant to question policies or make the case for change. That cannot be said of us. We will be brave for children and when challenging our politicians to do better.
Our current campaign to change how public debt, like council tax, is collected is just one example. Our successful efforts to encourage ministers to write off £2.8 million in school debt is another. There are better, more humane, and less destructive ways to collect – or even cancel – this kind of debt that is needlessly and unfairly trapping so many children in poverty and we will continue to say so.
Our concerns are raised with respect and in the knowledge that issues can be complicated but they are raised all the same. Our work is guided by what we know is good for children and part of that is to help provide governments, on both sides of the border, with the same insight and ambition.
Politicians are, of course, committed to ending child poverty and regularly tell us so. In truth, it would be odd if they were not but it takes more than warm words, good intentions and the right policies. It takes clear, transformative action and investment to deliver change. Poverty is not a choice for children, it is a choice for our politicians: to secure and improve those young lives or to continue talking about it.
Political promises have been made to generations of young Scots that have not been kept, a national shame even more acute because so many of them have only known lives full of betrayed trust and uncertainty.
We live in one of the richest nations in the world and better protecting those furthest away from power and privilege, those living in poverty and struggling to keep their families intact, should not seem like an impossible dream.
It will need commitment and courage but can be done and, until then, Aberlour, always changing, always caring, always brave, will continue to help our children thrive.
It is a significant year for our charity and, on a personal note, for me too after deciding to stand down from Aberlour later this year after 11 years as chief executive.
It has been my absolute privilege to lead such an important, impactful organisation supported by such a skilled, talented and committed team. Fittingly, from staff and board members to volunteers and donors, our organisation has the strength of a family.
We are family, have been for 150 years, and will be for many more to come.
SallyAnn Kelly OBE
Chief Executive, Aberlour Children’s Charity
This article was written as part of the 'We are family' special edition supplement with the Sunday Post.