The Rainbow Centre for Children is a charity for children and their families from Bristol and the surrounding area.

We help families deal with the pain, grief, anger and sadness that can be caused by the death of a child or parent or their life threatening illness and the impact that has on individual family members as well as the family as a whole.

Families come to us not only because someone has died from an illness but also as a result of road traffic accidents, suicide or murder.

We offer non-verbal therapies such as Art Therapy, Play Therapy & Music Therapy to children, as a valuable means of expressing emotions when words simply can't be found.

Young people, parents / carers may prefer counselling. We support individuals and couples.

Homoeopathy may be suitable for the whole family to help relieve both the side effects of conventional medicine, or the physical symptoms of grief or simply support the health of a carer so they have the strength to continue to look after their loved ones.

Massage therapy can help parents / carers relax or relieve physical symptoms of illness or grief.

Each therapy session lasts for 50 minutes, and the children or their parents / carers come at the same time each week so they build up a relationship and trust with our therapists.

All the therapy we provide is free of charge and we support families for as long as they need our help.

Each therapy session costs The Rainbow Centre £30 a session and we rely entirely on voluntary donations for our existence.

On average we see 60 new families each year in addition to those families that we are already helping.

We provide 66 therapy sessions to children and their families each week.

We expect the running costs of the Centre, a traditional Victorian house in Lilymead Avenue, just off the Wells Road to be £270,000 for the coming year.

Therefore any help will really make a huge difference to our work.