Impacts with the charity Missing People

The Missing People charity partnered us via Lucy Holmes on our steering group. Hester and Olivia produced the ‘Living with absence: family search for missing people’ report based on interviews with 25 families of missing people, which has influenced the charity’s training of volunteers and their subsequent funding applications to support their work in different parts of the UK.

‘Research is such a vital way to promote understanding and The Geographies of Missing People project has provided valuable insight into the experience of losing someone special, and living with this loss. I wholeheartedly welcome and commend this research. We are grateful to the families who took part in the research and for sharing something so personal for the benefit of others. This report, and its recommendations, will help all of us working with and supporting families of missing people by helping to ground us in the reality of how it feels to lose someone and not know where they are. I pledge that at Missing People we will hear the messages in this report from the families and work with its recommendations. We will embed these in our understanding, our practice, our communication and our development of services’.Jo Youle, Chief Executive Missing People Charity

‘I have seen this research have an impact on professionals’ understanding of the mind-set and experiences of adults who are missing. I believe it has commenced a change in attitude towards adults whose behaviours while missing now have more limelight than previously. This research has created a framework through which police can discuss how adults behave and think’. Missing People’s Head of Partnerships and Development