Our History
On the 28th February, 2000 Milli’s Child Contact Centre was launched operating from Bel Royal School on Sundays. 21 years later Milli’s continues providing a safe facility for child contact to take place benefitting their mental wellbeing on their path to adulthood.
In 1998 four divorced ladies together with support from Senator Wendy Kinnard and Deputy Imogen Nicholls, two local politicians launched “Support Through Divorce”. The group was also welcomed by many legal representatives and Advocate Vincent J. Obbard, Registrar Family Division at the time. The group met once a month and grew rapidly. Every other month a speaker from various government departments, legal practices, CAMHS and the family court were invited to attend, speak, and answer questions about their subject for divorced parents. Over time it became obvious that there was a huge problem with child contact and so the committee started researching what happened elsewhere in this regard and found the National Association of Child Contact Centres (NACCC).
On the 28th February, 2000 Milli’s Child Contact Centre was launched operating from Bel Royal School on Sundays. 21 years later Milli’s continues providing a safe facility for child contact to take place benefitting their mental wellbeing on their path to adulthood.
Over the years the charity provided information for Government debates on inheritance laws, maintenance laws etc. We highlighted problems facing divorced parents which would, or could, also impact upon the wellbeing of children and made family breakdown a subject to be considered in all debates rather than brushed under the carpet as a dirty word.
In 2012 with an ever-increasing workload, we decided to take the opportunity to review our services. We came across “The Centre for Separated Families” who are based in London and after many lengthily discussions and emails Karen and Nick Woodall, who are experts in all things to do with family breakdown, authors, and directors of the Family Separation Hub, came to Jersey in July 2013 to provide us with specialist training and transformed the charity into the Jersey Centre for Separated Families. We introduced new services including supporting parents to achieve collaborative non-court-based agreements wherever possible. In 2014 we produced a business plan for Nick and Karen Woodall to train up every front-line member of staff for the Government of Jersey in family breakdown over 3 years, sadly this offer was declined.
The name “The Jersey Centre for Separated Families” was chosen to reflect the fact that we offered various services, but the public still referred to the charity as Milli’s and so in 2018 we decided to rebrand to “Milli’s Separated Family Centre” We also started working closely with a counsellor who we can referrer clients to and we have launched our “Putting Children First” course which is delivered by the counsellor.
Milli’s has never received any government funding and continues to receive no Government funding. We are completely independent in raising our own funds. We believe we need to remain accessible to all in the community and therefore rely heavily on the generosity of those that support us.
