OUR TWELVE GOALS
What we are working to build through SoulForge Community
Our mission is to build a community of men who have suffered the impact of domestic abuse and parental alienation — and who encourage and support one another to rebuild out of the ruins, becoming stronger men through the experience.
The twelve goals below are not an abstract wish list. Each one comes from lived experience — from gaps we have fallen into ourselves, needs we have felt directly, and things that would have made a real difference had they existed when we needed them. Some are already taking shape. Some are long-term ambitions that will take years, funding, and the right people to realise. All of them, we believe, are needed.
We have set them out roughly in the order we expect to build them, though opportunities may change that sequence along the way.
The twelve goals at a glance
The Website
A resource hub that joins the dots between domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system.
A Moderated Forum
A safe, positive space for ongoing peer-to-peer support.
A Blog - ‘Strength Through Adversity’
Regular insight, commentary, and encouragement, on both the practical and the emotional sides.
Webinars
Live online sessions with experts and the chance to ask questions directly.
A Helpline
One-to-one support, triage, and signposting from people who genuinely understand.
Community Meet-ups
In-person gatherings, walks, and camps that rebuild connection.
A Family Law Advice Service
Affordable, men-aware practical legal support.
A Talking-Therapy Service
Subsidised, trauma-informed counselling for men.
A Book and Public Awareness
Survivor stories gathered into a single body of evidence.
Policy Evaluation and Campaigning
Challenging the structural failings in the system.
Refuges for Men
Emergency accommodation for men, and their children, fleeing abuse.
A Retreat Centre
A physical home for the whole community and its work.
The goals in detail - the ideas behind the ideas
1 — The Website
Our platform for information, useful resources, and signposting — covering both the emotional and psychological impacts of abuse and parental alienation, and the family law issues that so often come alongside them.
This is the foundation that pulls everything else together. We've learned, from our own experience and from talking to other men, that men often want to investigate what's happening to them privately first — at their own pace, in their own time, before they're ready to talk to anyone. Many haven't yet joined the dots in their own situation. They sense something is wrong but can't see the pattern.
So the website exists to join those dots. To help a man get a clearer picture of what is actually going on for him, and where it might be heading. Every man's circumstances are different, but there are recognisable patterns, and seeing them laid out clearly can be the first step toward acting with clarity rather than confusion.
One thing that sets this site apart: almost nowhere else is explicit about the overlap between domestic abuse and parental alienation. Most organisations focus on one or the other, and where the overlap exists at all, it's usually left implicit. We think being explicit about that connection matters — because for many men, the two are deeply intertwined.
2 — A Moderated Forum
A safe, structured space for peer-to-peer support, where men can share their stories, ask questions, and respond to one another — with the option of separate groups for different topics or stages of the journey.
Right now, the main place this kind of peer support happens for men is through Facebook groups. They're free, accessible, and for some men genuinely helpful. But they have limitations. They're usually moderated only for abuse, bad behaviour, and bad language — which means that, beyond that, all voices are treated equally. A considered, constructive, well-informed contribution sits alongside the most reactive or negative one, with nothing to distinguish them. Over time, some of these spaces become echo chambers rather than places of genuine growth.
We've seen a better model. Organisations in other fields — for example, communities supporting women through involuntary childlessness — have built subscription-based forums that members actively sign up to, creating spaces that are not just moderated but genuinely safe and genuinely positive by design. That's the kind of space we want to create: continuous peer-to-peer support, not bound to any particular time or place, but actively shaped to build men up rather than keep them stuck.
3 — A Blog: ‘Strength Through Adversity’
A regular space for insight, encouragement, and commentary — exploring issues in more depth than the main website can, without the core pages becoming bogged down.
The blog lets us go deeper on specific or tangential issues, and respond to things as they happen — stories in the media relating to domestic abuse, parental alienation, and men's struggles. It can cover the legal and practical side as well as the emotional, psychological, and philosophical. It's a space where we can continually bring forward material that might be of interest and use.
We aim to publish at least weekly, though in practice this depends on the time available. Over time, we'd like to feature guest writers and experts from across the relevant fields — it doesn't all have to come from one voice. And we plan to make the blog available beyond the website itself: through platforms like Substack, and potentially as video versions on a future YouTube channel. Readers will be able to subscribe and sign up, creating a more direct channel of communication than the website alone allows.
4 — Webinars
Occasional live online sessions — our aim is roughly one a month — where men can join a video call, hear about a particular subject, and ask questions directly.
Some men are drawn to the live, group nature of a webinar: the sense of a shared activity, the chance to hear from someone with real expertise, and the opportunity to ask questions there and then. As with the blog, we'd like to bring in experts across the different fields. It's another medium, another approach — part of trying everything we reasonably can to help men navigate these issues. A future YouTube channel may well be the natural home for these, alongside any direct delivery through the website.
5 — A Helpline
One-to-one support from people who genuinely understand — with practical knowledge of the issues and what actually helps.
Our long-term aim is a helpline able to take calls directly from men experiencing domestic abuse or parental alienation, offering guidance, encouragement, and — where needed — a measure of crisis and mental health support. The hardest moments often come at times when no one else is available, and a voice that understands can make a real difference.
In the earliest stage, the helpline's role would be triage and signposting — helping a man understand his situation and pointing him toward the right support. As our other services develop, the helpline would increasingly be able to refer men inwards — to our own legal advice and talking-therapy services — rather than only signposting outwards. Building this will take time, staff, and trained volunteers, so we expect to begin with a callback-request system before working toward something closer to a full service.
6 — Community Meet-ups
In-person and online gatherings across the UK — including walks, and potentially camps — to rebuild connection and share experience.
This goal comes directly from experience. There is real value in being in the same physical space as a group of men who have been through similar things — even when you're not sharing deep confidences with everyone present. Sometimes genuine connections form that go on to last. Sometimes it's simply the quiet reassurance of not being alone in it.
We've drawn on several models here: a weekend residential with a violence-prevention project that turned out to be unexpectedly valuable not for its content but for the company; long-standing father's-rights peer support groups; and even the workshop format used by organisations that prepare expectant parents, which showed how strangers with a shared situation can support one another while also receiving useful guidance. Some meet-ups could be walks, bringing in the restorative power of nature and physical activity. One idea is a camp — hiring a small campsite for a weekend, where the activity and the outdoors provide a healthy counterweight to the weight of the subject matter. Rebuilding connection and sharing ideas, in person, matters.
7 — A Family Law Advice Service
Affordable, reliable, men-aware practical legal support for fathers navigating contact, custody, and the wider family court process.
Navigating family law is hard, and good support is either prohibitively expensive or difficult to find. In the early days of our founder's own case, he was fortunate to have informal guidance from a family-law solicitor who was a friend of a friend — but relying on a favour has its limits; you can't push it too far, and you can't be on someone's case all the time. At other points, paid advice and representation were needed, at significant cost. A reliable, reasonably priced service — as opposed to the often extortionate cost of solicitors — would have made a real difference.
The model we admire most is the kind of support offered by experienced advisers and McKenzie Friends who understand the system from the inside, often through their own lived experience. One such person, John Denbigh — part of the wider father's-rights support network, and also working independently as a consultant, adviser, and McKenzie Friend — has been genuinely outstanding, and is someone we would point men toward without hesitation. Our ambition is to build a small team of advisers of that calibre: experienced in family law, focused on helping men self-represent effectively, able to assist with case management, process, and reviewing the documents and statements men produce. We would aim to subsidise this through the charity, offering means-tested, stepped fees — because some men can pay something toward legal costs and some can pay nothing at all. The goal is to take some of the luck out of working with legal professionals who may or may not turn out to be any good.
8 — A Talking-Therapy Service
Subsidised, trauma-informed counselling delivered by therapists who genuinely understand the issues men face.
Paying privately for therapy is difficult — and even when you can, it's hard to know in advance whether a given therapist has any real experience of these specific issues. We'd like to bring together a group of counsellors and therapists thoroughly trained in the dynamics of domestic abuse and parental alienation as men experience them, and to subsidise their work through the charity so that cost is as low a barrier as possible. Not everyone can afford sixty or seventy pounds an hour over several months. As with the legal service, we'd aim for a stepped, means-tested approach to fees, making support as accessible as we can.
This is also where the helpline and the therapy service connect: the helpline handles early-stage triage and signposting, while the talking-therapy service provides the deeper, ongoing support — and over time, the helpline can refer men directly into it.
9 — A Book and Public Awareness
Gathering survivor stories into a single published body of evidence — and using it to raise public awareness.
The idea for the book grew from seeing how powerful a collection of individual stories can be. Imagine fifty, or a hundred, real accounts from men who have survived domestic abuse and parental alienation, gathered together in one place. That is a great deal of evidence — evidence of a system that is failing, and of an issue that genuinely exists even though many people have never heard that it does. A hundred men, in effect, saying the same things over and over again, becomes very hard to ignore.
There are real considerations around doing this responsibly — anonymising accounts carefully (we anticipate using AI to help with this) so that stories can be told without crossing legal lines or compromising anyone involved, while keeping the truth of each experience intact. The book would focus primarily on stories, perhaps interlaced with short essays on specific issues, and with suggestions for what needs to change so that these stories are not repeated, generation after generation, to the detriment of both fathers and their children.
Once published, the book becomes a tool. A copy could go to every MP, every member of the House of Lords, to journalists, to anyone with the power to act. Not everyone would read it. But if even a few took it up as a cause and came to understand it better, that would be worth a great deal.
10 — Policy Evaluation and Campaigning
Working to evaluate and challenge the policies and practices in the family law system where structural failings cause injustice — particularly against fathers.
Following naturally from the book and the wider awareness work, this goal is about pushing for change at the systemic level. There is much that is going wrong — in how the family courts operate, in the processes and apparent biases of the agencies that advise them. Funding has been stripped out of these institutions and is unlikely to be readily restored. But if these bodies can no longer do the job they once did, there needs to be honest recognition of that — and a question asked about whether they should still wield the same powers.
Consider an example from our founder's own case: a family court adviser spent roughly thirty minutes with his two sons, and on that basis told the court, with apparent certainty, that the boys' stated wishes had not been influenced by their mother. To present something so consequential in such black-and-white terms, on the back of so little investigation, is troubling — and so is the weight courts place on such recommendations. Where resources are this thin, the powers and the certainty should be questioned too. That is the kind of structural issue we want to help bring into the open and challenge.
11 — Refuges for Men
Working toward a greater number of refuges across the UK providing emergency accommodation for men — and their children — fleeing domestic abuse.
The current provision is catastrophically thin. As of September 2025, there were around 429 refuge or safe-accommodation spaces for men across the entire UK — and only about 130 of those dedicated specifically to men, the rest being available to men or women depending on need. The figures are heavily skewed by a single organisation providing 46 dedicated spaces; remove that one, and the picture is even starker. The median provision is around six spaces per organisation. By the government's own Safe Accommodation figures for 2024/25, just 2,140 men — around 3% of the total supported — were helped in safe accommodation. Against the scale of need, this is a fraction of what exists for women. That is not an argument against provision for women, who absolutely need and deserve it. It is simply to say that men need genuine options too.
There's an important point here that we've explored elsewhere on this site. Many men don't go to a refuge because they don't feel their lives are physically at risk — and so they simply move out, often without their children. But moving out alone can change the dynamics in ways that prove disastrous for a man's longer-term relationship with his children. Accessing a refuge, by contrast, can shift those dynamics in his favour — opening access to support such as legal aid that might otherwise be out of reach. So part of this goal is also about making it clearer to men why a refuge might make sense, even when they don't feel in physical danger. (It's worth knowing, too, that local authorities already have a legal duty to provide emergency housing to domestic abuse victims, including men — though in practice this is often not well understood or well applied.)
Building this will be a major, long-term undertaking. Even for women, refuge provision did not appear overnight; it took years, effort, and funding. But the way to get there is to start taking steps in that direction — because the need is real.
12 — A Retreat Centre
A dedicated physical space — somewhere men can find peace, restore, and prepare for whatever comes next.
A retreat centre could, in time, bring together many strands of our work in one place. It could house a refuge. It could host weekend courses and retreats — somewhere a man can get space and time away from his situation, access counselling, guidance, and support, whether he's currently in the midst of an abusive situation or carrying the trauma of one years later. It could become our base of operations.
There is something grounding about a physical location. It lets you picture the community not as an idea but as a real place — men coming together, sharing meals, learning together, even working together. Our founder spent several years living in close community earlier in life and found enormous value in it: eating together, learning together, sharing the work. The dream is something like a farm no longer needed as a farm, where men could come and contribute to the work of converting and running it — drawing again on the restorative power of being outdoors, in nature, doing physical work — and perhaps spending time there with their children.
Many of the men we want to serve have tried to build homes and families, only to see those efforts sabotaged or torn away. Some have lost their children, their wider family, their friendships, through the very process this charity exists to address. To offer a place that is a genuine community — where men understand one another, support one another, and encourage one another — would be deeply healing. For many. Our founder included.
Where we are now
It's 2026, and we're only just beginning. By the time you read this, not all of this vision will yet have been realised — but together with a growing, experience-informed team, we are working steadily toward it.
If this vision speaks to you — whether you're a man who needs what we're building, someone who wants to help build it, or someone in a position to support the work — we'd be glad to hear from you. Every part of what we're trying to create has been shaped by lived experience. Every part of it is needed.