I was travelling one day when I noticed a woman with two children across the aisle. A girl of about nine and a boy of five — siblings, clearly — playing together with the unselfconscious absorption that children have before the world teaches them to be self-conscious. Their mother watched them with the specific exhaustion and pride that I have since come to recognise as the permanent condition of a parent who is doing their best with what they have.
I watched them for perhaps ten minutes.
And when I got off the bus I felt something I did not have a name for. Not sadness exactly. Not regret. More like — I have something to give that I have never given. And I do not know where to put it.
"I had chosen not to have children. That choice was mine and I stand by it. My reasons were honest. But the feeling on the minibus was also honest. And I could not find anything in the world that held both truths simultaneously."
I had grown up in difficult circumstances. Financial hardship from thirteen. A relationship with my parents that left me uncertain whether I could be the parent I would want to be. I needed freedom — a life lived on my own terms, without the weight of a commitment I could not fully honour. These are not excuses. They are the truth.
And yet. The feeling on the minibus was also true. The specific feeling that I had something to give — values, friendship, company, attention, presence — and no particular place to put it. Not the weight of traditional parenthood. Something lighter. Something chosen rather than obligated.
I looked for a structure that could hold that feeling. Adoption was too permanent, too legal, too total. Conventional sponsorship was too transactional, too distant, too passive to feel like anything real. Nothing existed that was honest about what I actually wanted — a real bond, a real contribution, a real relationship with a child's world — without asking me to become someone I had decided not to be.
"So I built it. Not because I had the answer. Because I could not stop thinking about the question."
Karmic Parents is not a charity. It is not an NGO. It is not a tech platform optimising for scale. It is a structure for people who have something real to give and have not yet found the right place to give it. Built by someone who spent years looking for exactly that place and could not find it anywhere.
The platform connects people like me — people who chose a life without children, or whose children are grown, or who have not yet found the right circumstances — with families in parts of the world where the relationship between giving and receiving is more visible, more honest, and more immediately felt.
It asks something real of everyone involved. The companion writes an honest letter and waits to be chosen by a family — not the other way around. Because in a child's world, money does not talk. Only who you are does. The family shares something irreplaceable — the unguarded journey of a child growing up — with someone they have decided to trust. And the child, at the centre of everything, is protected at every step by design.
Every decision made in building this platform has begun with one question — is this good for the child? That question will never stop being first.
This platform is early. The first families are being found. The first companions are writing their letters. I am saying this honestly because the people I want to attract are sophisticated enough to respect honesty about stage over the false confidence of a polished launch.
What exists already is real. The philosophy is complete. The structure is built. The commitment to the child is absolute. What comes next is people — the right companions, the right families, the right relationships — finding each other through it.
If you found this page at a moment when something in it recognised you — I built it for exactly that moment.
