Bobby Colleran Trust helping hundreds with bereavement counselling
The service was set up to help grieving 5 to 19 year olds across Merseyside
A Liverpool road safety charity set up following the death of a six year old boy is now supporting hundreds of children through bereavement counselling.
On what would have been Bobby Colleran's 16th birthday today (13 March), we can reveal the number of youngsters helped by the Bobby Colleran Trust has more than doubled, compared to last year.
Lead Counsellor at the Bobby Colleran Trust, Vicci Innes, said:
"I think it's a reflection of the way the world is and the things that are going on in the city that the need for bereavement support and mental health support is just sky-rocketing.
"We are inundated"
"We are inundated with children and young people who are desperate for external support and holistic things to improve their mental health and wellbeing.
"Last year we achieved a certain amount and this year we're only halfway through what would be our academic year and we're over those numbers already so we're going to double what we saw last year.
"We know from other services in the city that sometimes the referrals that we get have been waiting a long time on others and we pride ourselves on not having a very big waiting list.
"It's maybe longer than we've had in the past and longer than we want it to be, we want to see them straight away, but we're expanding our team as we're growing and developing so we're able to keep seeing those children."
Bobby was killed at the age of 6 in 2014 after being hit by a van outside his school in West Derby.
The Bobby Colleran Trust was set up with the aim of improving road safety - since then, 20mph Bobby Zones have been implemented outside 100 schools across the Liverpool City Region.
Jo Colleran is still bidding to extend these zones further across the region and country and to introduce zones outside schools to legally stop people from parking there.
Jo said:
"Our schools need to be safe and they're not. I want schools, all of them to have these zones outside where people are aware they're by a school and one of the main things is parking on the pavement.
"It's getting worse and worse"
"There's loads of work that we're doing behind the scenes but we need to have something in place, because it's getting worse and worse as a city.
"We need a zone outside a school where there's a certain space where you cannot stop and the traffic flows. At the minute, they're parking on kerbs.
"We need to change everybody's mindset"
"They've actually been so many incidents of when they're parking on the pavements that they've nearly hit a child on pavements, so I just think we need to change everybody's mindset and we need something enforced so it's not allowed and children can go outside school and go in safely."
Schools across Merseyside are taking part in 'Wear Blue For Bobby Day' and have had road safety activity packs hand delivered to them.
Jo added:
"We've got two road safety books but we've now got a third road safety book, which includes road safety activities which will help the children.
"We've hand delivered the packs within every school within Sefton, Liverpool, Knowsley and St Helens.
"It's road safety and the children need help and hopefully the way we've designed our new book, inside the activity there's loads of different things they can do as a class - they can photocopy them and loads of stuff they'll learn about road safety."