Helping hands in memory of tragic Harlow

charity: New organisation will help bereaved parents pay for funeral costs

The family of a toddler who died after she was knocked down by a car in Coupar Angus last October has launched a charity in her memory.

Harlow’s Helping Hand, named after two-year-old Harlow Edwards, will help bereaved parents who have lost a young child by providing support for funeral and headstone costs.

The organisation is still waiting to receive official status from Scottish charity regulator OSCR, but has already helped one family

Harlow’s mother Sara said: “At the moment we’re just trying to build awareness.

“We’ve applied to OSCR to get an official registration number but we thought now was the time to get started. “We’ve already helped one family. “We raised a couple of hundred pounds for them by selling Harlow’s Angels, little charms we made.

“There is a need for this and we just thought we would get cracking with it. This was the first kind of thing we’d done.”

The new group’s logo features a paint handprint made by Harlow which Sara, 36, branded “the perfect logo”.

Sara said: “Harlow made that for me at nursery and I had it on the fridge.

“She has inspired this so it seemed fitting she should be part of it.”

She added that she was “confident” the charity would be given official recognition once their application had been reviewed.

Through her own research, she found there were few charities offering comfort and support for bereaved parents of young children.

She said: “From what we can see I think we’re the first of our kind in the country.

“I could find one charity in England that parents who have lost a child can get help from but I couldn’t see anything at all in Scotland. So that’s why we thought it was a good idea.

“We got so much help and support and not everybody gets that.

“It’s just about helping people at that impossible bit of their life.

“If it lifts a bit of strain off the parents then it’s worth it.

“We have done fundraising for the air ambulance but we thought we’d try it for ourselves.

“That got us thinking we should just get started — and that’s what we’re doing. We are just getting started.”

Harlow Edwards died after she was hit by a car last October.

Schoolchildren planted bulbs last October in memory of Harlow.