"I told him about my feeling there should be a live online system that adopters should be able to use directly to look at profiles of children. One of the people he spoke to about it was the government's adoption adviser Martin Narey. "After a couple of years, we started thinking maybe we should develop that." The same wasn't around to help children find the right adoptive placements, and it seemed wrong that such a thing didn't exist. He explains: "Whatever you're trying to do, there's generally a sophisticated online system that allows you to do it, such as. Increasingly, he was having conversations about the need to improve the way prospective adopters and children needing permanent homes were matched up - and he recognised that doing this online would be easier. It was at that time that the idea for his next venture began to crystalise. Leary-May was a director of NFS until 2013, during which time he and his partner adopted two young sons. "I was relatively confident lots of LGBT people were going to adopt and that it was going to grow - and agencies were keen to show they were being inclusive, so the funding for it came from local authorities and voluntary agencies that paid an annual subscription." "I'd never been involved in adoption or charities up to that point, so it was a big learning curve for me," he says. So, typical of Leary-May, he set up New Family Social (NFS), an online support group - now a charity - for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people who have adopted or are adopting. Once he started researching adoption, it didn't take him long to realise there was a distinct lack of support for same-sex couples going through the process. ![]() It was just a couple of years after the introduction of new laws, through the Adoption and Children Act, that allowed same-sex couples to adopt. So in 2006, he handed the design consultancy over to his employees, started building a boat with his partner, with whom he had just entered into a civil partnership, and decided it was the right time to adopt. "Problem-solving and creating new things, whether products, processes or organisations, is what interests me," says Leary-May, who, after eight years running his own design consultancy from the same east London office his dad built in the 1960s, decided he needed a new challenge. It is a characteristic he picked up in childhood watching his engineer father produce car parts in his workshop, and then went on to nurture through an industrial design degree at Brunel University before more recently applying it to the adoption sector. ![]() ![]() Andy Leary-May likes finding solutions to problems.
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