Skip to main content

Our Story

Childhood Matters | Supporting Families & Keeping Children Safe

Childhood Matters is a non-profit child & family support service. Our child and family support services are aimed at supporting and promoting positive childhood outcomes. Developing & understanding parenting capacity, building overall family resilience, and contributing to healthier and more sustainable communities.

Our services are tailored to the needs of each individual. We are dedicated to using a relationship working model that aims to understand and respect the needs of each individual we work with. The aim of Childhood Matters is to promote positive change and development where it is needed.

Our clinical and family support teams practice strengths-based learning, child psychological development, trauma informed care, new-born mental health, and parental development. These strengths allow our team to provide high quality services with the aim to encourage clients to be and do the best they can.

We strongly believe that healthy communities foster good families, and as a result, we support local community development initiatives in Cork City. The initiatives that we support aim to enhance social cohesion, inclusivity, sustainability, and provide avenues for the actualization of family support benefits.

Meet our Executive Team

Childhood Matter’s Board of Directors is chaired by Mr John Minihan and includes Sr Lorna Walsh, Sr Nora Emperor, Mr Andrew McCarthy & Ms Helen Finucane

Dr Calem De Búrca

CEO

CDeBurca@childhood-matters.ie

Lee Dempsey

Finance and Operations Manager

ldempsey@childhood-matters.ie

Gary O’Brien

Compliance and Communications Officer

garyobrien@childhood-matters.ie

Our Values

We hold a strong passion and desire to make a worthwhile impact in the lives of those we work with.

Integrity

In our work we promote a positive culture of openness, transparency, ethical behaviour and effective governance. Our culture is to uphold the highest ethical standards and to act with honesty and integrity. We are transparent, open and truthful in how we deliver our services.

Respect

Our work often brings us into contact with some of the most marginalised members of society. Treating all people with respect and dignity, therefore, is the cornerstone of our culture. We will seek to ensure that our staff and external stakeholders are also treated with respect. We are committed to diversity and we will respect all individuals and value their contribution.

Fairness

Treating people fairly is fundamental to our relationships with all of our stakeholders. Fairness also contributes to a healthy work environment that promotes engagement, openness and transparency. We will aim to be consistent in our approach and our decision-making to ensure that all service users we work with will know what to expect from us.

Development

Development is a key value that allows us to strive to the best we can be in all areas of operations, as services providers, employers and colleagues. We believe everybody has the capacity for positive development and we will support and scaffold them in doing.

Our Funding Partners Include

child & family support
child & family support
child & family support
child & family support
child & family support
child & family support