Clear Sky Children's Charity Joins Help2Fund

Helping children heal from trauma using play. We are glad to welcome Clear Sky Children's Charity to Help2Fund.

Who they are

Clear Sky works in schools across Oxfordshire with children who are carrying things most adults would struggle to carry. Bereavement, including family suicide. Domestic abuse. A parent in prison. A parent in addiction. Sexual exploitation.

These are not children who present as obviously in crisis. Often they are the quiet one, or the one who is difficult in lessons, and the connection between the behaviour and what is happening at home is not made for years, if it is made at all.

Why play, and not talking

The instinctive adult response to a child in distress is to get them to talk about it. With young children this mostly does not work, and not because they are unwilling. They do not yet have the vocabulary, the emotional literacy or the narrative structure to explain what has happened to them. Asking them to sit in a chair and describe it puts the burden of translation on the person least equipped to carry it.

Clear Sky's therapists use child-led play and creative arts instead. The child directs the session, chooses the materials, and works through the thing in the language they already have: sand, figures, paint, dressing up, music, story. The therapist follows rather than steers.

It sounds soft. It is not. The charity reports that 95% of the children they work with show measurable improvement, and the approach is well established in clinical practice for exactly this age group.

Working in schools

Delivering this in schools rather than clinics matters more than it might sound. The child does not have to be referred through a waiting list, does not need a parent who is well enough to take them to appointments, and does not have to be identified publicly as the child with the problem. They go to a room in a building they already go to every day.

For children whose home life is the source of the difficulty, that access route is often the only workable one.

Where your money goes

A £2 donation provides a welcome kit for a newly referred family, with developmental information and games to play at home.

A £5 donation covers materials for several one-to-one creative arts sessions.

A £10 donation provides a new creative arts kit for one of their therapists.

A £20 donation buys a dressing-up kit or a musical instrument for a child to use to express themselves.

A £50 donation pays for a full one-to-one therapeutic session for a vulnerable child.

You can donate on their Help2Fund page: help2fund.org/donations/clear-sky-children's-charity

Volunteering

Clear Sky would welcome volunteers to help at their events and raise the charity's profile through fundraising. If you are in Oxfordshire and can give time, contact them directly.

More about the charity at clear-sky.org.uk

About Help2Fund

Help2Fund is a free platform that gives small registered charities in England and Wales promotional support and fundraising infrastructure they would otherwise have to pay for. It is run by a team of volunteers, and the support is personalised to each charity rather than sold as a fixed package: some partners want social media content, some want a donation page, some want help telling a story they have never had the time to write down. Nothing is ever published without the charity signing it off first. In-person volunteering sessions with our partner charities are planned for the future.

A child who cannot explain what happened to them has not moved on from it. Clear Sky gives them another way to say it, and then does the slow work of listening.