Emily Aklan

Emily Aklan

CEO & Founder

London

serenitywelfare.org

Serenity Welfare

Notable Achievements

  • Best Businesswoman Award – Best Business Woman working with Children & Families 2021
  • Great British Businesswoman Award – Social Enterprise Businesswoman of the Year 2022
  • Big Issue 100 Changemakers 2022 – Social Justice (Hope Instead of Handcuffs Campaign

Latest Podcast

In Conversation
Emily AklanIn Conversation

Emily Aklan is the Founder and Chief Executive of Serenity Welfare, an organisation that offers comprehensive welfare services for children and young people.

Emily Aklan is the founder and chief executive of Serenity Welfare, an organisation that offers comprehensive welfare services for children and young people.

Career Overview

Emily Aklan is the founder and chief executive of Serenity Welfare, a uniquely integrated organisation that works with UK-wide local authorities, children’s charities, schools, alternative education provisions, youth Offending Services and other healthcare professionals, offering a fully comprehensive welfare service for children and young people - including those in care - 24-hours-a-day, seven days per week.

Emily founded Serenity Welfare in 2016 after being horrified to discover that children in care - some as young as 10-years-old - were being transported from care home to care home or picked up from police stations after absconding episodes in handcuffs and sometimes with their feet tied.

It was this experience of seeing the challenges within the care and justice systems - and the changes that need to be made - that led Emily to launch the new ‘Hope instead of Handcuffs’ campaign to end the handcuffing of children.

Emily's work and campaigning led to her being named as the Social Enterprise Businesswoman of the year at the Great British Businesswoman Awards in 2023.

Early Life

Emily was born in Holloway, London, residing in Palmers Green with her family before settling in Enfield. At the age of 18, Emily embarked on a career as an estate agent. Discovering that she had a natural entrepreneurial streak, Emily quickly excelled in the industry and progressed to working for large UK housebuilders and boasted an enviable profile in the sector, becoming a director of the company she worked at by the time she was 31. In 2004, Emily made the decision to branch out on her own by launching her own business: a project-directing consultancy operating across the UK, Turkey, Italy and Dubai.

Serenity Welfare

Tragically, Emily experienced the care system herself when her sister died and Emily had to fight to secure custody of her two nieces. Out of concern for what might have happened to her nieces came the idea for Serenity Welfare, with Emily determined to stand up for extremely vulnerable young people in memory of her sister.

Serenity Welfare was born in 2016 out of Emily’s determination to find a new way of treating at-risk children with dignity and compassion. From the beginning, her focus was very much on the wellbeing of young people and showing them that they were valued members of society.

Serenity Welfare’s mission statement is to treat people how you would like to be treated and the organisation prides itself on providing safe, comfortable and secure transport services to ensure each child and young person feels a sense of self-worth in a relaxed environment. They have a 100 per cent success rate in ‘stress free’, compassionate and therapeutic journeys.

Serenity Welfare also offers 24/7 wrap around care, crisis intervention services, talks and presentations on gangs and county lines, and high-quality mentoring services so that vulnerable children receive the positive and consistent nurturing they need.

The organisation’s staff are fully trained in de-escalation and mentoring and have never used and vow to never use handcuffs to restrain children. One young person that Serenity Welfare transported even requested a court judge to place them into their care, which culminated in the opening of its first residential home.

Hope instead of Handcuffs

Emily was shocked to discover that vulnerable children and young people in the UK are still being handcuffed or restrained. Too often, vulnerable children - such as those in care or those being exploited by vicious county lines gangs - are treated as criminals rather than victims who require care and support to rebuild their lives.

Having proven through its own approach that such a hostile means of transporting children is unnecessary and that all children should be treated with kindness and respect, Emily launched the ‘Hope instead of Handcuffs’ campaign to push for a change in the law around the use of physical restraints and handcuffs on children and young people within the care system.

The campaign’s core objective is for the government to ban the handcuffing, restraining, or caging of children except when there is a considerable risk of the child harming themselves or others.

Emily and the rest of her campaign team have worked tirelessly to lobby the governments of each UK nation to ban this appalling practice. In October 2022, the campaign made a breakthrough in Wales, which become the first UK nation to protect innocent children in care from being handcuffed or restrained when being transported between care settings, under landmark new regulations introduced by the Welsh Government.

Since launching the Hope Instead of Handcuffs campaign, Emily has featured across national media including the Sunday Express, Daily Mirror, Sky News and the Guardian, and has spoken at major public sector events to shine a light on issues affecting vulnerable children in care, from mental health issues to county line gang grooming.

Queen’s Honour Nomination and work through Covid-19

Tragically, Emily experienced the care system herself when her sister died and Emily had to fight to secure custody of her two nieces. Out of concern for what might have happened to her nieces came the idea for Serenity Welfare, with Emily determined to stand up for extremely vulnerable young people in memory of her sister.

Serenity Welfare was born in 2016 out of Emily’s determination to find a new way of treating at-risk children with dignity and compassion. From the beginning, her focus was very much on the wellbeing of young people and showing them that they were valued members of society.

Serenity Welfare’s mission statement is to treat people how you would like to be treated and the organisation prides itself on providing safe, comfortable and secure transport services to ensure each child and young person feels a sense of self-worth in a relaxed environment. They have a 100 per cent success rate in ‘stress free’, compassionate and therapeutic journeys.

Serenity Welfare also offers 24/7 wrap around care, crisis intervention services, talks and presentations on gangs and county lines, and high-quality mentoring services so that vulnerable children receive the positive and consistent nurturing they need.

The organisation’s staff are fully trained in de-escalation and mentoring and have never used and vow to never use handcuffs to restrain children. One young person that Serenity Welfare transported even requested a court judge to place them into their care, which culminated in the opening of its first residential home.

Achievements

•   Best Businesswoman Award – Best Business Woman working with Children & Families 2021

•   Great British Businesswoman Award – Social Enterprise Businesswoman of the Year 2022

•   Big Issue 100 Changemakers 2022 – Social Justice (Hope Instead of Handcuffs Campaign

Listen to Emily Aklan's Leaders of Great Britain podcast.

In the News

Hertfordshire children’s rights campaign named Social Enterprise Businesswoman of the Year 2022

News | Published February 1st 2023, 8:49 am

Emily Aklan has been recognised as one of this year’s most exceptional women in business at the second annual Great British Businesswoman Awards. Emily, CEO at Serenity Welfare was honoured as Social Enterprise Businesswoman of the Year.Read more →

Hope Instead of Handcuffs campaign gains political traction following parliamentary drop-in event

News | Published May 26th 2022, 8:52 am

Serenity Welfare’s Hope Instead of Handcuffs campaign has been fighting to end the physical restraint and handcuffing of vulnerable children being transported between homes for the last six years.Read more →

Children's rights campaigner Aklan calls for change of narrative around looked after children

News | Published May 23rd 2022, 8:16 am

Writing for CareTalk, Emily Aklan, founder of Serenity Welfare and the children’s rights campaigner behind the Hope Instead of Handcuffs initiative, calls for a change of attitude around vulnerable young people and urges government to help dispel the myth that such youngsters are responsible for their own troubles and invest in the services they require.Read more →


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