Photographs and stories

Almost every photograph on this site is licence-free stock, in place so the design can be shown working while the trust's own photographs are made. None of it shows the trust's work, and none of it is captioned as though it does. The pictures carry no names of places or people, and the hero and the photo wall both say plainly that the imagery is indicative.

The genuine images are these: the trust's logo, three award certificates, the ten press cuttings, and the nine covers of the trust's own newspaper.

The site this replaces used around seventy stock photographs of people in other countries and presented them as its own work. That is the failure being corrected. Using stock while you wait for a photographer is ordinary; letting a donor believe it is your work is not.

When real photographs replace these, they are to show people as people and not as objects of pity: as recognisable individuals doing something, not as anonymous suffering. Nobody is to be photographed in a way that a reasonable person would find humiliating, and nobody in a hospital bed, a queue or a shelter is to be photographed without being asked first.

Consent means told what the photograph is for and free to say no without losing the help. Consent for a child comes from the child's parent or guardian, and from the child.

No story on this site is invented, and no testimonial is written on anyone's behalf. The only first-person quotations in this project are from named trust members who published them themselves.

Where the site would benefit from an individual's story — and it would — that story will be told only when a real person has agreed to tell it, in their own words, having been told where it will appear.

Every number on this site is one the trust publishes itself. Nothing is estimated, rounded up for effect, or carried over from a press cutting. Where the trust has not confirmed something — its 80G status, for one — the site says so rather than filling the gap.