Parents 1st UK
An open-access platform empowering perinatal peer support across the UK.
Parents 1st UK is a charity with more than 25 years of experience delivering impactful peer support during pregnancy, birth and early parenthood. In 2018, the Parents 1st UK Board partnered with Made Open to create a national open-source, community-led network.
Scaling impact in a system under pressure
Despite their success, Parents 1st was under strain. Demand was growing, funding was uncertain and too much responsibility sat with a small central team. The model worked - but it wasn't yet designed to spread.
Parents 1st needed to answer some fundamental questions:
- How can we reach more families without overstretching ourselves?
- How do we share what works while protecting quality?
- What should we stop doing and what should others take on?
Creating clarity before building anything
Before jumping to technology, we worked closely with the Board to step back and rethink the organisation's future.
We facilitated a theory of change workshop to explore whether an open-source approach could unlock scale and sustainability. This wasn't a given - it required honest reflection on the organisation's strengths, pressures and ambitions.
Together, we:
- Surfaced the reality of the current model - including over-reliance on leadership, capacity constraints and funding pressures.
- Clarified the end game - defining what success looks like at scale, from replication to becoming a national knowledge hub.
- Tested strategic options - including open source, replication and commercial models.
- Mapped the forces for and against change — identifying what needed to strengthen or shift to move forward.
This process led to a critical insight:
Open source could dramatically increase reach and impact — but only as part of a blended model, where free resources act as a gateway to training, support and consultancy.
Just as importantly, it helped the team sharpen their focus — recognising that achieving more impact would require doing less directly, and enabling others to take the model forward.
A platform designed to enable a movement
With a clear strategy in place, we co-designed and built a bespoke platform to bring this vision to life.
The Parents 1st UK platform now serves as a national resource hub, offering hundreds of tools, guides and templates. It also functions as a peer network, connecting practitioners and organisations across the UK, while acting as a vehicle for replication and adaptation - enabling others to adopt and evolve the model within their own communities.
At its core, the platform reflects the principles developed during the workshop: a commitment to open access to knowledge, a belief in community-led learning and sharing, and a clear pathway from freely available resources to more in-depth support.
From delivery to enablement
Parents 1st is now positioned not just as a service provider, but as a field-builder — supporting others to deliver high-quality perinatal peer support at scale.
By shifting from doing everything themselves to enabling a wider network, they are:
- Increasing reach without increasing central capacity.
- Strengthening the wider ecosystem of peer support.
- Building a more sustainable and scalable model for the future.
"We want perinatal peer support to flourish and the awesome Made Open platform is helping us to make that happen."
Celia Suppiah
Founder of Parents 1st
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