50 years of Home-Start Home-Start began supporting families on 1st November 1973. Fifty years to the day since our work began, we held an online celebration to mark this special moment in our history. The event was hosted by Trisha Goddard (TV/radio presenter and patron of Home-Start Norfolk) with an array of special guests from Home-Start past and present. Watch it now: Home-Start's history Home-Start was founded by Margaret Harrison, who believed that supporting a family was best done in their home where it could be shaped to meet their individual needs. Margaret Harrison said "Parents with young children filled me with an overwhelming sense of awe at how they were expected to cope, and indeed to survive at all, often in the most appalling circumstances, and against all odds. They were my real motivation for establishing Home-Start. We quickly learned that it was much more important to focus on the parents, (mostly mothers in those early days), their well-being and emotional needs. A sincere “How are you?” and a smile for them had far greater potential to be reflected back on their child(ren) than any more cognitive approach. Simply sharing time, kindness, practical, help, generosity, and fun, we learned, can be immensely rewarding for everyone involved". While Margaret Harrison's ideas remain at the heart of our work, we have created new ways of helping parents and their children that meet the changing needs of families and society. This simple idea that started in Leicester in 1973 has now spread to hundreds of communities across the UK - as far north as Orkney in Scotland, and as far south as the Channel Islands. It also provides support to forces families based in Cyprus. The success of the approach has led to Home-Start Worldwide, which operates in 22 countries, on five continents, all providing our unique model of support for families. Watch 50 years of Home-Start in numbers: Margaret Harrison remained life president of Home-Start until her death in 2015. In photograph below, Margaret Harrison (red jacket) can be seen with Princess Diana, patron of Home-Start 1992-1997 Manage Cookie Preferences