Steadfast, dependable and inspirational; the Queen’s patronage supported Family Action through some of our most challenging, and successful, times.
Many of us mourning the loss of Her Majesty The Queen do so in intensely personal ways, with her reign providing the stable backdrop to profound changes in our own lives.
For many of us these have included things such as births, partnerships and marriages, the loss of loved ones, changes in our circumstances, the impact of world events and social change.
Family Action is no different, as the time spent under her patronage marks some of our most productive and challenging times as, in turn, the world has changed around us too.
We’d existed for nearly 100 years when the Queen assumed patronage of the charity from Queen Mary in 1953… and we’d achieved a lot during that time.
This included establishing the first Citizen’s Advice Bureau and helping to shape what we now understand as social work through developing the concept of casework and creating much of the guidance that defined it and the social worker’s role.
Yet, despite the many advances that we made over that early period of our history, our name itself shows just how much was yet to change during The Queen’s tenure as our Patron. In 1953 we were called the Family Welfare Association, having changed our name from the Charity Organisation Society ten years earlier.
Under HM The Queen’s patronage, we set about putting our developing knowledge into wider practice during the 1950s by playing an integral role in teaching new social work courses and by providing advice and practical help to immigrant families from the West Indies.
With our greater understanding and appreciation now of the tremendous challenges those families faced when they came to the UK we can only hope that FWA made a significant and positive difference to them at the time.
We got the chance to meet HM The Queen in person when she attended our centenary celebrations in 1969, giving her the chance to speak with both our staff and the families that benefitted from our services.
Our work in the years that followed the Second World War that would define the Queen’s service had taught us a great deal about the strains that traumatic events could place families under.
These experiences also helped to define new therapeutic treatments which appeared during this time, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.