About us

About Alternatives

Alternatives was founded in 1994 as a professional and confidential service to anyone experiencing unintended pregnancy, pregnancy loss following an abortion or a miscarriage, or struggling because of a pregnancy-related issue.

The work has expanded over the years to include a wider professional qualified counselling service as well as advocacy, advice and signposting support to parents. Each year we now support over 100 families.

Last year we gave over 780 food bags and gave 228 donations of clothes & equipment. We celebrated 225 birthdays and wrote 8,360 letters or emails to support our clients. We helped 18 people move into work, training or voluntary positions. We delivered over 2,945 individual support sessions. Over 4,460 hours of time were donated by our volunteers. Alt-Ed talks engaged with over 3,000 young people in Newham.

Due to the high rate of religious observance in Newham (over 90%) and the importance of sex education in schools, for over a decade Alternatives’ education team have developed and delivered faith-sensitive Relationship and Sex Education in local schools, colleges and youth settings and manages a website for young people www.fryp.org.uk on behalf of the Newham Interfaith Sexual Health Forum. For more information on the education team, click here.

Our Counselling service is not for profit, and adheres to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) codes of ethics and practice. For more information about BACP click here or for UKCP click here.

Alternatives was started within a local church and maintains an open Christian ethos, believing that God loves and values everyone, without exception, and we should do the same.

Charitable status
We are an independent registered charity (registration number 1103724) funded through grants and individual donations. If you would like to support us, please click here to donate.