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Project Profile

Founded in 1996, relationship charity Explore works with teenagers across the country, encouraging them to consider the importance of lasting relationships and marriage. Explore brings young people into contact with married Christian couples who can share their experiences of married life, and the values on which their marriage is based.

Explore seeks to: • Connect young people with married couples who can share their experiences • Enable young people to think positively about long-term relationships • Tackle the worrying statistics about family breakdown in the UK

CHRIS’ STORY

For most of us, our family is at the very centre of our lives. Family is where children are nurtured emotionally, physically and psychologically – where life-long relationships are developed that enable young people to grow into confident, competent and capable adults. The family is also the basic building block of society; when family breaks down, society suffers.

Marriage remains the most common form of partnership for men and women in the UK with around four times as many couple’s in families being married as cohabiting. There are 7.7 million families in the UK, with some 13.3 million children – 63 percent of whom live in a married couple’s family.

However, the UK has one of the worst levels of family breakdown in Western Europe, across a range of incomes and social backgrounds, with the direct annual cost of family breakdowns estimated at a staggering £41 billion. Statistically, January is also the busiest time of year for divorce lawyers, with many couples waiting until after the festive period to tackle their relationships issues.

It is estimated that family breakdown directly affects a third of the population, and an untold number indirectly. The number of lone parents has also doubled from 1 million to 2 million since 1980, with the collapse of young unmarried families now accounting for 70 percent of all family breakdowns. Although many single parents do an excellent job, statistical evidence shows the benefit to young people of being in a two-parent family.

Nevertheless, there may be an answer. Explore has had a humble beginning, but is now starting to gather momentum. Since 2000, Explore has worked with over 25 local schools, and enabled over 33,000 young people nationally to discuss the importance of lasting relationships and marriage in today’s world. We rely on a network of volunteers who give up their free time to go into schools and community centres to talk to young people about their personal experiences of relationships, marriage and family life.

In my opinion, and from research we have undertaken at Explore, the vast majority of young people hold very real and deep aspirations for having an enduring and meaningful relationship, healthy family life, and eventually marriage. However, it has been recognised that less than five per cent of today’s young people have ever had the opportunity to hold a detailed and open conversation on the subject of relationships.

Relationship skills cannot be taught in an instructive manner or through lectures, but from experience. By providing a platform for young people to discuss the questions they may have, we hope that students can see for themselves the value of lasting relationships.

CHRIS FORD is the CEO of Explore. Find out more at www.theexploreexperience.co.uk

FIVE QUESTIONS

Here are five talk triggers to get young people talking about their ideas about, and hopes for, relationships. 1. Who do you think are good relationship role models? Posh and Becks? Wills and Kate? 2. Do you think you will settle down with one person for life? 3. What do you think is the best kind of family set up for raising children? 4. Could you forgive a husband or wife who cheated on you? 5. Do you think marriage is important any more? Why? Why not?