About Face to Face

Face to Face was established in 1993 by a small group of counsellors who wanted to make counselling accessible to people who otherwise may not be able to afford it. The service for adults on low or no income started in a room of a flat in Salford.

Hilary Barbar, vicar of St. Clement’s Church, and his parish council, offered us the use of a room. So the counselling service was able to move to Chorlton-cum-Hardy. At this time the service had grown to include 8 counsellors. All the counsellors were volunteers. Some placements were offered to counsellors who were near the end of their diploma training.

Face to Face was in danger of folding, because some volunteers who had been organising Face to Face for many years moved on. At that time, four qualified counsellors, Kerry Briggs, David Fenton, Karen Ryan and Jenny Armstead, tentatively decided to take over the organisation. Before leaving, Jay Clarke managed to secure £6000 funding from Central Manchester PCT Small Grants Fund to cover the running costs of Face to Face. From this strong base the organisation was able to build.

Hilary Barbar again offered enormous support when he allowed us to use a second room at St Clements - the church supporting Face to Face’s mission to continue to provide counselling for people on low income even though there was enormous pressure on the available space in the church. At that time we had 33 clients on our list and some clients had waited 6 months. The PCT Small Grants Fund again gave us £500 from their Health Initiatives Fund which helped us to establish this second room so that we could reduce waiting times for clients, recruit more volunteers and improve safety and sociability for our volunteers.

In 2004 we were approached by Barbara Heywood who wanted to volunteer her services to establish a therapy group at Face to Face. Voluntary Action Manchester (VAM) assisted us in gaining funding from Community Chest and Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (NRU) so that this important work could be introduced. The £1500 they gave us helped us to furnish the room for group work and pay for running costs.

A management committee was established at this time and we had around 12 volunteers.

Jenny Armstead began pursuing her interest in developing a service for Children and Young People (CYP) by attending a specialized training course. On gaining this further qualification and with funding from VAM, NRU and Community Network 4 Manchester (CN4M), Jenny and a new volunteer, Gill Lloyd Jones, who had also attended the course, established the counselling service for CYP at St Clements.

When Colleen Sweeny, the learning mentor at Chorlton High School, approached us, we started a counselling service for pupils - a service based in the school.

Support from VAM continued and again they gave us funding - this time to get us ‘on-line’, to recruit even more volunteers (around 18 by now) and to begin a library.

More volunteers joined the Face to Face adult team. Also, Donna Quinn and Tricia McCabe joined the CYP team. Tricia had applied for funding from the Local Network Fund for Children and Young People for equipment and training so that we could continue and improve the service for CYP. They awarded us £5000 per year for the next 2 years. We now have two further volunteers who would like to join our CYP team.

We are now a registered charity and we have about 30 volunteers, each offering a minimum of 2 counselling sessions per week. We aim to continue the service to the same high standard and reduce waiting times for clients.