A call to arms?

I am always amazed how things you may have said can so easily be misinterpreted.

Allegedly I have said that I don’t agree with a national organisation to support grandparents across the UK, what utter rubbish!

I am not sure where that puts us and all the other groups across the UK?

When I set up BGSG 12 years ago I just wanted to find other grandparents who were going through the horror of estrangement and alienation. For me at that time, grandparents who were near me, so that we could meet up and share our experience and be there for one another.

12 years on, and BGSG is bigger than I ever imagined.

We have now been contacted by almost 7,000 grandparents from all over the country and beyond.

Not sure how more national we could be?

We have supported and worked with other grandparents who have set up their own groups across the UK.

I have written before about all groups joining together and there are several reasons why that is not as easy as it might appear.

One is that some groups don’t agree with our ethos of putting grandchildren first, they want grandparents rights, and there is nothing wrong with that, it is just not where we are coming from.

Another is that we know the work involved in running BGSG and the hours of paperwork that is involved. There are rules and regulations that we have to abide by, we have to stick to our document of governance.

This is the part that I think people don’t understand.

If all of the groups across the UK joined together, it would be huge. It would have to be run and managed.

Who is going to do that?

As a volunteer?

The amount of fund raising would also be enormous, it costs a great deal of funds to run these organisations.

Just running the helpline is time consuming and a very emotional and sometimes stressful thing. Grandparents in distress will contact us at all hours, because they need help and they need it now, it is the nature of the beast.

Although there may be calls for us all to get together to move things forward, when I ask for people to talk to the media, very, very few come forward.

We all have strong views on what is wrong with the system as it stands, we all know it is not fit for purpose.

It is one thing to see where the problem lies what is not so easy is to come up with a solution.

If there is a problem you have to find a solution or nobody listens.

Getting back to there being a national organisation, dealing purely with denied contact, estrangement and alienation of grandchildren, there are as I have said many groups giving support right across the UK: Lincolnshire, Worcestershire,Hampshire,Oxfordshire, Durham, Hendon,Milton Keynes/ North Hants, Congleton and Scotland. ( The laws in Scotland differ) these are groups that we include on our website.

If you are looking for a national organisation then there is Grandparents Plus, they merged with The Grandparents Association several years ago, they help and support Kinship Carers I am not too sure how they support grandparents who are estranged from their grandchildren.

Our focus has always been and always will be the rights of grandchildren in having an ongoing relationship with their grandparents/extended family after a family breakdown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Jane

Jane setup Bristol Grandparent Support Group in 2007 after a string of incidents led to the loss of contact with her Grand Daughter.

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