Parent and Baby Awards 2025 Best Trauma-Informed Child Protection Service Provider 2025 Having spent more than a decade working as a social innovation pioneer, Safe Children has come to be recognised as a leading entity in protecting children and adolescents from violence, abuse, and neglect. The organisation specialises in healing individual and intergenerational trauma in those families with high-risk or complex family structures – educating and empowering across its trauma-focused and solution-focused approaches. Founder Rikke Ludvigsen was on hand to tell us more. Guided by a belief in the power of prevention, healing, and transformation, Safe Children strives to create safer environments for children around the world, affording them the tools they need to grow up safe, resilient, and whole – even after battling trauma and adversity. Millions of children fall into this group, and rarely do they get the help they need. Rikke Ludvigsen established Safe Children in 2012 to support vulnerable children, train professionals and help in the prevention of stress, burnout, and compassion fatigue in professionals working with traumatised children and families. “Safe Children has been driven by the ambition of continuously developing new, better, and more sustainable solutions to support children at risk and their families”, explained Rikke. “We do this by using a methodology merging social work, trauma treatment and neurobiology in unique and transformative ways.” Such alignment results in tailored interventions built around collaboration, establishing a sense of belonging for the child whilst also delivering innovative solutions rooted in trauma-informed safety planning to prevent violence, child abuse, and neglect. One example of this is the ‘Circle of Safety and Reconnection’ model employed by Safe Children, with this compassionate reflections approach providing the basis of the 1-year Certified Trauma-Informed Family Therapist training Safe Children delivers. This is also the subject of a book penned by Rikke herself: ‘A Professional’s Guide to Working with Vulnerable and Traumatised Children – The Healing Circle’. Central to Safe Children’s success is Rikke’s more than 20 years of experience working with at-risk children. The expertise she possesses has seen Rikke develop unique methods based on a combination of safety planning and trauma healing, uniting these areas under the umbrella of her organisation’s lived motto: ‘Remember… there is hope for healing.” This has been chosen as many of those she and her partners work with have previously been given up on by other professionals, an action Safe Children will not repeat. On the back of her knowledge, Rikke has also developed a special trauma-healing model, namely the ‘Reconnect Trauma Release System’. As gentle as it is effective, this method works by reconnecting a traumaaffected person with their body, mind, and spirit, embodying the organisation’s overarching belief that safe children are happy children. “When people have lost their own hope, we lend them ours so we can become a vicarious hope for healing – showing them a way through the darkness.” The approaches mentioned above have resulted in the training and supervision of more than 1,000 professionals in the field of child protection over the last 13 years by Safe Children, a number it is looking to increase through the provision of online courses, workshops, retreats, and tailored programmes for organisations surrounding the topic. This is also supported by Rikkes new social enterprise Resilious, Co-founded with 2 partners. All of these initiatives are more important than ever in today’s world, as the online sphere is only exacerbating mental health issues and abuse in children and young people. To combat this, Rikke shared that Safe Children is developing new project ideas to better support young people and parents alike, including a plan to transform the content on its online platform, Safe Children Academy, into programmes for children and adults. This is just one of the ways Rikke is hoping to take Safe Children international, her efforts in which began with the publishing of her aforementioned book last year. Ready to share Safe Children’s work and message of hope and healing with the world, this October will see Rikke present her models at a conference in Shanghai, in addition to running a workshop at the European Social Work Conference in Oslo that very same month. With Rikke working tirelessly towards these award-winning services, all that is left is to call for adults across countries, generations, and backgrounds to influence and support children and young people in any way they can, helping them to feel safe, protected, and valued. This may starts with Safe Children, but Rikke cannot do it alone. More information about the organisation’s work can be found at the link below. Contact: Rikke Ludvigsen Company: Safe Children Web Address: https://www.safechildren.dk/ Crowdfunding Campaign https://www. ifundwomen.com/projects/safe-childrensupporters-0.
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