About Us

Options 4 Change is a community-based charity supporting children, young people, and families facing disadvantage, deprivation, and hardship. We recognise that periods of academic exclusion and challenging peer influences can leave young people vulnerable to negative pathways, including gang involvement and reduced life opportunities.

Our work focuses on prevention and empowerment. Through advocacy, casework, and tailored support, we help families address pressing issues such as homelessness or the threat of eviction, unemployment and low income, overcrowded or unsafe housing, and parenting challenges. By tackling these barriers, we create safer, more stable environments where children and young people can thrive.

We also provide enriching opportunities beyond the classroom. Our summer residentials and community projects combine personal development workshops with fun, safe, and nourishing activities. This ensures children and their families feel supported, connected, and valued.

At the heart of everything we do is our belief in changing lives and minds for better. By equipping young people with the tools to succeed and supporting families to overcome hardship, we build stronger communities and brighter futures.

Donna Sinclair

Chief Executive Officer

Message from the Options 4 Change CEO:

Our charity has continued to actively engage our service users, partners and communities to have representation and a voice in all of our projects. Since 2005, we have sustained our passion to inspire academic and social aspirations whilst enabling the children, young people and their families worked with, to achieve more and realise their potential for greatness.

Based in the heart of Brixton, in the London Borough of Lambeth, we are as busy as can be. Our dedicated teams of workers, volunteers and community partners make invaluable contributions to our various projects.

Our Education Sustainment services are designed to provide support to pupils with additional learning needs or facing challenges to sustain their education. Our Education Sustainment Officers work in schools with pupils and parents to address the challenges that some pupils face to reduce the risk of them falling out of mainstream education and underachieving in the long term.

Many pupils, as a consequence of their experiences and peer engagement during periods of academic exclusion, may become vulnerable to gang recruitment and access pathways into unproductive and undesirable life outcomes.

Additionally, we deliver Family Welfare services of advocacy and casework support for whole families and individuals whose needs of various hardships and challenges include but are not limited to;

Homelessness, or threat of homelessness;
Unemployment or low income;
Overcrowding and disrepairs;
Parenting skills development.

During the summer holidays our residential and community projects enable children and their families to participate in our personal development workshops and have fun whilst being safe, fed and happy.

Ultimately, we work to enable children and young people to have positive education and family life experiences with the ultimate goal of “Changing Lives and Minds for Better.”

“Options 4 Change and Donna have got [grandson] back into school and that’s made me so happy. Without them I don’t know where we’d be by now.”

- Mrs Baxter, quoted in Evening Standard (2012)