Why did we create Sussex Children's Care?
We thought children deserved something different.
Sussex Children's Care didn't begin with plans to build a large organisation. It began with conversations about what a children's home could feel like. We wanted to create small homes where children could be properly known. Where the adults around them had the time, support and freedom to build real relationships. Where ordinary things mattered. And where care didn't have to become less human simply because it was professional.
Manty's became our first home.
And a lot of what we believe has grown from the life that has happened there since.
We didn't have all the answers.
When we opened Manty's, we had ideas about the kind of place we wanted to create. Some of those ideas have stayed with us. Others have changed completely.
The children have probably taught us more about what a good children's home should be than any policy ever could.
We've learned that relationships can't be reduced to interventions. That the smallest moments can matter enormously and that adults need looking after too. We have also learned that getting something wrong isn't the end of a relationship.
We've also become increasingly uncomfortable with some of the language and habits that residential care has inherited. So we've questioned them. Not because we think we've got everything right.
Because we think children deserve adults who are willing to keep asking whether we can do better.
The people who started it
Sussex Children's Care was started by Daniel Crowley and David Bradley.
We're different people, with different strengths, but we shared a fairly simple belief: children living away from their families deserve more than a service that keeps them safe. They deserve people who know them. People who notice when something isn't quite right. People who celebrate the tiny things. People who can get things wrong, say sorry and come back. People who genuinely care what happens to them.
We wanted to build an organisation that made space for that.
Sussex Children's Care has grown around kitchen-table conversations, difficult decisions, mistakes, laughter, late-night phone calls, brilliant adults and, most importantly, the children who have trusted us enough to let us into parts of their lives.
We're still figuring it out.
Sussex Children's Care will grow. There will be more homes and more adults.
But we don't want growth to make us less human. We want every home to remain small enough for children to be known, every adult to understand the importance of the relationship they hold, and every decision to come back to the same question:
What would we want for a child we loved?