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If you are a child in care, I'm told, you have a lot of conversations with a lot of people: social workers, charity workers, counsellors, teachers, foster carers. The chances are that none of them has been in care. And you have. You notice.

“With hindsight, it sounds obvious,” says Hugh Thornbery, strategic director of children's services at the charity Action For Children. “It's not uncommon in other areas: Guides, Scouts - people who have had the experience stick around. And people who have been in care have the most insight into what it's like to be in care. It just takes a eureka moment.”

It happened last year. The Rainer Foundation was looking at ways to provide children in care with mentors. Some bodies tried students, some professionals, some volunteers. In Cornwall, Action For Children tried care-leavers, setting up a programme called Two of a Kind. Eureka.

Letter from the Editor

The global financial crisis means charities are struggling as never before to raise funds and meet a sudden surge in demand for their services

Multimedia

• Video: Corinne Bailey Rae on why she supports Pump Aid

• Video: Dermot Murnaghan on why he supports Action for Children

• Video: Sally Brampton explains why she supports Thrive

BACKGROUND

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• Who cares? I do

One such care-leaver was Kerry Bown, 22 and from St Ives. We meet at the YMCA in Redruth. Kerry is in a hurry because she has to collect her toddler from nursery, but mentoring is her new passion and she is messianic about it. She is blonde, cheerful, a bit nervy, and she knows her stuff.

“I was fostered at 12,” she says. “At first I was a bit scared. It felt weird having a loving family to look after me. I didn't have that with my own family.” For her first Christmas with her foster parents, they gave her the sort of toys normally given to four-year-olds. “They bought me a doll,” she says, beaming. “And I loved it. I took it to bed. I was 12 or 13 but I didn't care what people thought. It was what I'd always wanted.”

It's a rare social worker, I'd have thought, who can dredge up empathy to match that. “You talk to someone who hasn't been through it all,” says Kerry, “and they say ‘I know how you feel'. And you might turn round and say ‘Well, no you don't. You haven't been there. You haven't been through the system.”

Being taken into care is what didn't happen to Baby P, and what didn't happen to the two daughters of that incestuous Sheffield businessman. Those in the industry talk about a political pendulum that swings between seeking to keep children with their families, and the alternative, which is taking them away. In recent years the pendulum has swung towards the former, with care orders plummeting. It can now be expected to swing the other way.

Indeed, it is swinging already. Since the end of the Baby P trial two weeks ago, The Times reports that care requests have soared by 26 per cent compared with the same period last year. Even before the Sheffield case came to light, the Local Government Association was warning local authorities to be wary of overreacting and letting it swing too far.

When a child is considered at risk, care is a solution - but not a great one. In all marginal groups, care-leavers are overrepresented. As Newsnight reported this week, they are five times more likely to have mental health problems. A third of homeless people have been in care, as have a third of young offenders and a quarter of adult prisoners. Since 2004, only 1 per cent of care-leavers have made it to university. Had Baby P been taken into care, in other words, his life would probably have been longer and better, but not exactly great.

Kerry's mentee was Hannah, now 13. We speak on the phone on a Sunday. Hannah is about to go for a riding lesson. “She wouldn't judge me or think I was silly,” she says, simply. “She didn't know me and my background but I could trust her.” Sometimes Kerry and Hannah would chat, sometimes Kerry would help with her homework. Hannah's favourite subjects are science and maths. She wants to go to university and eventually to be a vet.

“Quite quickly,” says John McConnell, Action for Children's project manager, “we found we were getting a double benefit. For the mentees there were clear benefits at school, in their ability to engage in social activities and in improved relations with their foster families. And the mentors gained enormous confidence from the experience of helping somebody else.”

“There is a lot of discrimination against care-leavers,” continues McConnell. “Say that you're going to recruit care-leavers as mentors and some of those you would expect to be supportive - social workers, teachers, whoever - say ‘Huh? You can't do that. You can't trust them'.

It can't be easy working with children in care, in any capacity. “You've got young people who have often been seriously damaged very early in their lives,” says McConnell. “It's not always easily reparable. And if their parents have been swearing and hitting and leading chaotic lives from the time the child was very young, that child won't be sweet and wonderful.”

And once a childhood in care is over, they are out on their own. “The average age for leaving home is about 24,” says McConnell. “Normally you have three goes at it. You move in with a friend, it doesn't work; you go off to college, it doesn't work; you go off on a gap year, you go back home. Care-leavers can't do that. Even the benefit system has built-in discriminations - you don't get your full whack until you are 26, based on the notion that you have some family help. But if you are a care-leaver, you don't.”

You can stay in care until you are 18, although many leave at 16. You may be lucky enough to be part of a Leaving Care scheme until you are 21. After that, nothing.

Vince Reeves, one aspiring mentor whom I met in Cornwall, described the experience as like hitting a brick wall. “You've had a bit of help,” he says, “and when they go, you really are screwed. It's hard being on your own.”

Kim Parker, 21, was another mentor. “It's exciting when you leave care,” she says, “but yeah, it's also scary. If you get a letter that says your council tax hasn't been paid, even though it has, you need somebody to calm you down and say it will be sorted. My Leaving Care worker left me at 21. But why should it end?”

Training as a mentor gives a care-leaver an NVQ3 in advice and guidance, and also a sense of continuation. Speaking to those training as mentors, nothing shines through so much as their sudden pride in learning that the experiences they went through were experiences with value, that can be used to help others.

“Often they are not used to succeeding at anything,” says Thornbery. “Something like this shows them that they can make a real difference. It's difficult for most of us to understand how big an impact that can have. It boosts their confidence, which boosts their ability in all sorts of ways. See it for yourself - it's quite moving.”

Kim, now a manager at a Co-op in Illogan, outside Redruth, thinks that being a mentor greatly improved her ability to deal with people. “I had s**t people skills. I'm quite abrupt,” she admits. “I've calmed down a hell of a lot now.”

Vince Reeves, 21 and from Lostwithiel, is part of the new intake of trainee mentors. He left care at 16, and left Leaving Care six months ago. He is now at college, training in IT. “I wish I'd had a mentor,” he says. “I've had to learn the hard route. What advice would I give? Ha. Stay out of prison.”

Vince spent his years in care all over Cornwall. “I was moving four, five, six, maybe ten times a year,” he says . “You arrive somewhere new and you know how it's going to be. You have a row, then they phone up the social workers. Take him away.” Vince wants to be the person his mentees can always call - “somebody who's not going to shout ‘It's all your fault'.”

He has been in trouble and didn't do a lot of school. He has been homeless, too, and knows that in many walks of life this would make him a bit of a mess. Yet in this one it makes him supremely qualified. He is itching to help people. It makes him glow. As Thornbery said, it is moving to see. One day Vince would like to run a care home of his own. For now he is excited about the mentoring, but also nervous. “Some of the training is pretty scary,” he says. “It's fun but there's real-life issues. It's weird being on the staff side of it, not the kid side.”

“It does validate people in an extraordinary way,” says Clare Tickell, the chief executive of Action For Children. Until recently the charity was known as NCH, or National Children's Home. It does run some homes but most of its work is community-based, helping young people in care; helping them to leave care and find work; finding carers for disabled children; working to locate adoptive parents and foster carers. Besides lobbying and campaigning, it runs 450 projects and reaches 170,000 children.

The charity was founded by a Victorian philanthropist, Thomas Stephenson, in 1869, and even the name was forward-looking in its day, when the idea that impoverished children should have a caring home was almost revolutionary. “It's a relatively recent concept, the way we mollycoddle our children,” says Tickell, “in all the right ways, of course.”

The hope is that one day Two of a Kind can be rolled out across the country. “It's not for everybody,” says McConnell, “but of 300 care-leavers, maybe 5 per cent would do it. So you could almost say to a young person, if you want a mentor who is care-experienced, we can provide one. And with the dual benefit, to me it's a no-brainer. Show me the money.”

Because it always takes money. The mentors are volunteers but training each one costs a four-figure sum. All the same, McConnell says: “If a young person says to their mentor ‘I had sex this weekend' and the mentor says ‘Do this, this and this' and you save one unwanted teenage pregnancy, that has recouped the cost for the whole pilot. If you keep one young person out of court, God knows what that saves - but the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Editor's letter by James Harding

The global financial crisis and tough economic climate mean that charities are struggling as never before to raise funds and meet a sudden surge in demand for their services. Last year, breaking all previous records, Times readers helped to raise more than £600,000 for good causes whose work changes the lives of millions of people at home and abroad. But your generous support this year is even more pressing.

We have chosen to support three charities representing three very different causes that we know Times readers care passionately about.

At a time when concern is mounting about the safety of children from abuse or neglect, the excellent and innovative work of Action for Children is particularly relevant. The charity, formerly known as the National Children's Home, runs numerous projects designed to help children who are forced to live away from their families and in the care system, from seeking out parents to adopt or foster children to supporting young people when they leave care and enter adult life.

Our second charity, Thrive, uses gardening to change the lives of those who have suffered strokes or heart attacks, lost their sight or who struggle with mental illness. Simple training techniques from their devoted therapists mean that anyone can learn how to grow plants, flowers and vegetables, whatever the physical and mental challenges they face.

Our third charity, Pump Aid, works overseas to establish supplies of clean water and safe sanitation in Africa. More than 5,000 children die every day as a result of their poor water supply, and 2.6 billion people have no access to one of life's basic essentials - a toilet. Pump Aid has developed a simple low-cost pump and lavatory using local products and basic techniques that all communities can learn to install and maintain, guaranteeing a supply of fresh water in their village. The charity was founded by a British student teaching in Africa ten years ago and its pumps are now common in Zimbabwe. They have also spread to Malawi and Mozambique - and with your help there are plans to expand into a host of other countries.

Over the next few weeks, Times journalists will describe the outstanding work that these charities perform every day of every year. We will meet the people who run the charities and the individuals whom they have helped.

Please show your support for their work by donating today. You can follow our appeal each day in the paper and give money to your chosen charity at www.timesonline.co.uk/timesappeal , or by using this coupon.