"In August 1992 Vanessa, my wife, and I faced our blackest moment when our beautiful eldest son Benjamin was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of just seventeen. In many ways it would have been easy just to crawl into a corner and let the world go by, but we had three other equally lovely children and, from our tragedy, a growing feeling that some good must come. And so, in that moment, The Benjamin Foundation was born.

We had chosen to live in North Norfolk, moving in order to convert a lovely set of traditional flint farm buildings into our family home. I guess many people will see North Norfolk in that rather idyllic way. However, for others, the reality can be very different.

There are many individuals who face the same daily problems and challenges as their counterparts living in more urban settings - and those problems are compounded by living in isolation, with fewer services and facilities to support their needs and made worse still by a poor public transport infrastructure.
Given the dispersed, and at times sparse, nature of the client groups we wished to serve, a number of essential methods of working were identified.
We recognised that we needed to be holistic in our approach. We needed to create easy and accessible front doors through which people could enter and then provide specialist services which addressed their needs. We needed to ensure the quality of these services and recognised there was no way in which we could provide all of them alone so genuine partnership working was going to be essential. We needed to ensure our isolated client groups could easily access services and therefore either the provision of transport or the delivery of outreach services was going to be crucial to success.

We gained charitable status in 1994 and, with our first grants from Children-in-Need and Comic Relief, we started to deliver services in January 1995. Our charitable objectives enabled us to deliver any service around social welfare or education, cradle to grave, and our Board made a decision to prioritise services and facilities for young people in the first instance. (It should also be pointed out that we made the sensible decision to invite representatives of other agencies to sit on our Board and their input has been extremely valuable). This gave us the scope to test our holistic model with a single client group and not over stretch ourselves.

It’s amazing that from our small, local roots we’ve grown into a county-wide service provider engaging with thousands of young people and families every year.

We still operate very much as a ‘family’ and have a wonderful, dedicated team of staff and volunteers who’s commitment and enthusiasm keeps The Benjamin Foundation’s heart beating so strongly.”