Friend was set up in London in 1971 as a CHE taskforce intended to become CHE's counselling arm.
By the end of the year Friend had become a separate national counselling and befriending organisation. As the London-based organisation began to spread across the UK, and local groups grew up, the whole network began to be known as National Friend.
It was incorporated as a limited company in 1987 with the name of National Friend Ltd.
National Friend became a network of groups whose volunteers provided information, support and befriending to lesbians, gay men and bisexual people. Local groups were affiliated to National Friend, though they remained autonomous within agreed guidelines, which included a constitution, code of ethics, code of practice, an equal opportunities programme and a complaints procedure.
In 1995 there were 31 local groups calling themselves either Friend or Gay Switchboard.
The National Committee supports the local groups, provides guidance, advertises the work of Friend to outside agencies and holds conferences on subjects of mutual interest.
In 1998, a grant from the National Lottery Charities Board enabled the development of a permanent office in Birmingham where two members of staff deal with administration, publicity and fundraising.
London Friend was separated from CHE in 1975.
Read more about this topic: Campaign For Homosexual Equality
Famous quotes containing the word friend:
“A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“We never exchange more than three words with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)