My name is Jamie. I'm a UKCP registered integrative child and adolescent psychotherapist and the founder of Where We Start.

I set up Where We Start because of what I kept seeing in my clinical work. Over years of working with children, young people and families across Waltham Forest and London, the same thing came up again and again. The difficulties children experience are rarely just individual problems. They are ecological. Children develop in relationships with those around them and are affected by the pressures their families face and the environment in which they grow. All of this shapes who they become. And yet the support available rarely starts from that understanding. The parents and carers who surround that child, who are just as much a part of the picture, are frequently left without support of their own.

I wanted to do something about that. Not by adding another service that operates on the same terms, not by simply offering more therapy for children, although that will be part of the project. But by building something different. Something rooted in the community, shaped by it, genuinely accessible to it, and something that supports the whole ecosystem around the child.

That's Where We Start.

Where We Start is an ambitious project. Right now it begins with something small and concrete: community parenting groups, meeting in Walthamstow, open to anyone. That is the seed. What grows from it will be shaped by the people who show up. It does not offer prescribed or fixed interventions. The people who come are not passive recipients, they are co-creators, bringing lived knowledge of what it is actually like to raise a child here that no professional training can replicate.

That means groups and workshops shaped by what people actually need, not by what us professionals assume they need. It means therapeutic support on a pay-what-you-can basis, because financial pressure should never be the reason a child or family goes without help. And it means staying open to being changed by the community we are part of.

My path to this work started in 2017 when I left a career in the music industry to train as a psychotherapist. I began volunteering in Walthamstow and Enfield, working in schools and with families, and I haven't really left. Since then I've worked across state and independent schools and therapeutic services in London, alongside multidisciplinary teams and agencies including CAMHS and Social Services.

Where We Start grew out of all of that. Out of the work, the gaps I kept noticing, and a conviction that this community already has so much of what it needs. It just needs somewhere to bring it together.