As a Mam to an autistic child, I was struggling to find advice and support until I came across Challenging Behaviour Support Peer Support Meetings.

Attending those sessions, where I felt I was understood, could gain advice and felt less alone changed my life.  I started volunteering and eventually was able to become a paid employee of a fab team thanks to securing National Lottery funding in 2020. I know that I am not alone in my experience. Since the beginning, parent carers’ experiences have been central to developing our services, and we have continuously evolved to ensure we meet the needs of parent carers.

Our rebranding to the Behaviour Support Hub is part of our journey.

In 2014 Donna and Claire, our co-founders, with a group of volunteer proactive RCT parents who struggled to find the support they needed for their children, who were diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) came together.  They felt isolated with nowhere to turn to for help, so they decided to act.  The parents started a regular peer support group, so they had an opportunity to share experiences in Pontypridd, and that’s how our Challenging Behaviour Support CIC commenced.

As we grew and expanded, more of our parents and partner organisations advised us that they didn’t like the negative connotation of our name, and therefore we decided to change our name.  Easier said than done, with countless hours of us discussing and speaking with families, we finally decided on Behaviour Support Hub.

Part of my role previously was helping to secure funding for us, and it became clear that we were not eligible to apply to the majority of funders as a community interest company and that we needed to become a registered charity to ensure we could access as much funding to expand our services.  Therefore, we decided to rebrand as a new charity and name at the same time.

We were so fortunate to find Emily Merchant, who listened to our stories and thoughts by bringing them together to come up with our new, wonderful logo and rebranding.

We also like to express our gratitude to Wizard Communication for their website-building wizardry.

I am so excited that we are continuing to expand, from starting to offer training to schools this year to welcoming over 2700 families to our peer support network.  It’s also been lovely to meet more families in their communities as we’ve now launched peer support sessions across the area, and we’ve managed to secure an additional office to be able to offer more services.

I know our next chapter will be even more exciting as we hopefully will secure more funding to be able to offer more services and reach more families in need.