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Three children sitting together on concrete steps, laughing.

Home The kids

There is not one real child's name or face on this page.

This is deliberate, and we want to explain it before anything else, because the choice makes fundraising harder for us, and a choice that costs you something deserves an explanation.

Storytelling ethics

An eight-year-old cannot consent to something they will not understand until they are twenty-eight

A real child photographed at their worst moment raises more money than anything else. The conversion data is clear. It also means permanently placing the most vulnerable stretch of someone's life on the internet in exchange for donations.

Our rules

  • No photographs of any child we serve. Every image on this site is licensed stock and depicts no one we work with.
  • No real names, including first names. Pseudonyms are chosen by the child where the child wants to be involved.
  • The narratives below are composites, assembled from elements of several real situations. None corresponds to one identifiable child. This is labelled at the top of each one, not buried in a footnote.
  • Anything published as a real individual requires written caregiver consent plus the child's own verbal assent, and can be withdrawn at any age, without a reason, actioned within 72 hours.
  • No specific details of abuse, neglect or family trauma, even with consent. Those details serve the donor's emotions, not the child.
  • No child thanks a donor at an event, on video, or in a letter.

A story should not need a child's face to matter.

A child in a red hat holding a book.

Composite · pseudonym · Kinship Bridge

“Lia,” nine, living with her grandmother

Lia moved in with her grandmother on a Tuesday night. These arrangements usually happen on a weeknight, because they are not planned, they are absorbed. Her grandmother is 67, on a fixed income, with a spare room and no bed in it.

The foster system pays a monthly stipend for a placed child, provides training, assigns a caseworker. Lia never entered it. Her grandmother took her that night and spared her that rupture. The price of doing so is that the household receives nothing. This is not a loophole. It is how the system is built, and it affects roughly 2.5 million children.

Kinship Bridge delivered a bed, bedding, a desk and a lamp within 48 hours. A partner legal aid organisation completed the caregiver authorisation affidavit in six weeks. Until then, the school could not formally enroll her for want of paperwork.

What her grandmother said afterwards was that the hardest part was not the money. It was that nobody told her which thing to do first.

A boy smiling while reading a book.

Composite · pseudonym · One Steady Adult

“T,” from eleven to fourteen

T barely spoke for the first four months. His mentor asked in supervision whether he was doing something wrong. The social worker's answer was that T was testing whether he would leave. Some version of this happens in nearly every match, and it is the hardest part of the program, because it is demoralising for the adult and offers no feedback.

In month fourteen, T sent a message asking whether Saturday could move. That is the only milestone logged across the whole three years, and it looks like nothing. Asking to reschedule means assuming there will be a next time.

We are not going to say the program changed T's life, because we do not know that. What is verifiable: he had one adult who showed up fortnightly for three years and missed nothing. Nothing in his first eleven years had that record.

From the adults

These come from teachers, caregivers and mentors, who can decide for themselves whether to speak

Adults can assess the consequences of speaking publicly. Children cannot. That is why this section holds only adult voices. All published with written consent, named as each person asked to be.

For the first August in nine years I did not buy notebooks with my own money. It sounds small. It was three hundred dollars, and it was my daughter's dentist.
Fourth-grade teacher — partner district, ninth year teaching
I thought the hard part was Monday to Friday. It is Sunday afternoon. They know there is food tomorrow, and there are still six hours to get through.
School social worker — Friday Bags partner school
There is a line in the training I resisted at first: you are not here to fix him. Three years in I understand it. My entire job was to keep turning up.
Mentor — year three of a match

The quotations above are illustrative copy demonstrating this page's format and consent process. Real quotations complete written consent and fact checking before publication.

What will never appear here

The list in reverse

  • Any identifiable child's face
  • Specific accounts of abuse, neglect or trauma
  • Before-and-after framing of any kind
  • Thank-you letters from children to donors
  • Home addresses, school names, or anything locating
  • Details of a parent's legal or immigration status
  • A child's grades used as proof of our effectiveness
  • Anything a child might reasonably regret as an adult
Full safeguarding policy Support this work