“Everyone on the team is highly passionate about early intervention and are all specialists in that area,” Chorus co-founder Dr Eva Crasnow explains. “We have about 10 highly specialised experts, all of whom have worked at one time in CAMHS services. We advocate for the highest quality early intervention.”
Chorus was founded in 2023 by psychoanalytic child psychotherapists Dr Sarah Peter and Dr Eva Crasnow, who between them have over 20 years’ experience working in NHS, local authority and charity settings. They bring together adoptive families and special guardians who are facing challenges into therapeutic groups, with a focus on both early intervention and on peer support through connecting families who may be going through similar challenges.
Too often, adoptive and special guardianship families can feel isolated, and mainstream mental health services rarely recognise the importance of connection and community. Our research into special guardianship families has shown that local authorities often struggle to provide adequate support, which leads to “avoidable and significant stress” for these families. Similarly, a Nuffield Foundation study concluded that “timely, effective intervention” is essential to prevent children and families from becoming isolated and to support healthy development. Chorus aims to provide exactly this kind of early support. In a group setting, Chorus aims to empower families to receive the support they need, but also begin to give support to others. By building lasting relationships, families are able to develop the support networks that are the foundation of a healthy life.
“The groups are a space where families are supported to tolerate thinking about difficult things – without idealising or demonising. What’s really unique is that it’s subtle and complex therapeutic work, led by expert psychotherapists, with the children there,” says Eva.
What’s different, and completely central to Chorus’ work, is the way it makes children’s experiences a vital part of the therapeutic process. “It’s about really bringing the child in – learning ways to communicate with the child while taking care of the parent’s feelings too,” explains co-founder Dr Sarah Peter. “If a parent learns to tolerate their own mixed or difficult feelings, it’s easier to manage that from their child.” It is very important that both children and families feel empowered and directly involved in moving forward in a way that feels right for them.
This kind of expert early intervention, especially one that so directly centres the experiences of children, is not currently the norm. “Special guardians and adopters come together at an isolated time of their life – often reeling from their experiences,” explains Eva. “The system has a tendency to think that, once a child is out of harm’s way, the situation is resolved, but this ignores multiple cumulative and complex issues. In particular, the trauma experienced by the adoptive parents is often unacknowledged – this might look like fertility trauma or loss, or for same sex couples, discrimination.”
Chorus invites families to join groups on a cohort system, aiming to work with the same families and the same groups together over an extended period of time in order to allow families to make real connections. Groups run for a period of five months and many families will take part during their adoption leave from work. The groups meet in community settings that are able to accommodate Under-5s, which might include toy libraries, nurseries or children’s centres. The spaces are chosen with accessibility in mind, as well as by thinking about what environments will be comfortable and welcoming for the children. “Many parents who come to us are very used to being told what to do,” explains Sarah. “This isn’t like that. It’s not parent training.” Many people who meet through the groups stay connected at the end of their time with Chorus.
The groups are a space where families are supported to tolerate thinking about difficult things – without idealising or demonising. What’s really unique is that it’s subtle and complex therapeutic work, led by expert psychotherapists, with the children there.Dr Eva Crasnow, co-founder of Chorus
“It was a support system in lots of different ways – it was about opening ourselves up socially again,” said one parent who joined a therapeutic group through Chorus. “It was also very specifically about finding a group of people who are in the same boat as us at the same time as us, which we’d lost, it was a way of the three of us connecting as a family.”
Sarah and Eva both point out that cuts to adoption funding have hit the families they work with hard. Despite these challenges, they are determined to grow. They currently have eight staff, including themselves, three trainees funded by NHS England and two students funded by UCL. They won the Association for Infant Mental Health Award in 2024 for best practice in infant mental health.
Another parent described the autonomy they felt working with Chorus: “This is the best analogy I could put, is that we were in this ship, and we’re in rocky sea waters that were rough, and the staff were just navigating us. [Chorus] were like the beacon that navigated us to which direction to go. But let us make the decision, and I think that was quite reassuring for me. It made me slowly, slowly grow into actually feeling, ‘Yes, I can do this, and I am doing it right’, and not doubting myself as the weeks went on.”
Learn more about Chorus’s work with adoptive and special guardianship families here.
