About this reference
This is not the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation. That was a real registered charity, it held this domain, and it closed. Kept Company is a new, independent, non-commercial reference with no connection to it. It runs no scheme, matches nobody and trains nobody, and it does not award or assess the quality mark the Foundation used to issue.
Kept Company is an independent, non-commercial reference on mentoring and befriending in the United Kingdom, published at a domain that previously belonged to the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation.
What this site is
A reference, and nothing else. It runs no scheme, matches nobody with anybody, trains no volunteers, accredits no organisation, sells nothing and takes no advertising. It exists because the practical knowledge about running a one-to-one volunteer scheme in this country is scattered across funder reports, closed intranets and the memories of coordinators who have since moved on.
About the domain, and the organisation that used to hold it
This domain was the web address of the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation, a registered charity that supported mentoring and befriending organisations across England and which, among other things, awarded a quality mark called the Approved Provider Standard. The Foundation closed. Its work is not continued here and this project has no connection to it, to its former staff or to its trustees.
We say this plainly and more than once because most people who arrive here follow a link that was written years ago and that says the Foundation’s name. If you were looking for the Foundation, you have not found it. What is here instead is an independent attempt to write down the same subject from scratch.
This site does not award, administer or assess the Approved Provider Standard
The Standard is described on this site only as history, in the past tense, on the quality standards page. Nobody here can assess a scheme against it, advise on it, or issue anything resembling it.
Why there are no photographs of people
Every illustration on this site is a line drawing of an object or an empty room, or a diagram. There is no photograph or drawing of a person anywhere, and that is deliberate. The subject here is lonely older people, children referred to mentoring, refugees and adults at risk. The stock photography that exists for it, the smiling volunteer and the hand on the wrist and the older woman at the window, is staged, is of nobody real, and patronises both the reader and the person it claims to depict. There is also nobody we could photograph who has consented to appear here. So the chairs are empty, and that is the honest picture.
How the pages are written
Every page reconciles its figures to one canonical table, so the site cannot answer the same costing or duration question two different ways depending on where you land. Where the honest answer is a mechanism rather than a number, the page gives the mechanism and names the body that publishes the figure. Fees, grant ceilings, salaries and return on investment claims are deliberately absent.
This is a reference and not advice. Safeguarding decisions, employment decisions and anything involving a specific child or adult at risk belong with the people who hold the duty for them.