About us
Tiny Tools for Big Feelings CIC exists to help children, young people, parents, and adults understand anxiety, regulate emotions, and feel safe in their bodies again.
We are a Community Interest Company, which means every programme, guide, and course we deliver helps fund free or subsidised support for children and families who need it most
Carly Openshaw
Carly Openshaw is the founder of Tiny Tools for Big Feelings CIC and a trauma-informed coach specialising in children’s anxiety, emotional regulation, and family support. With over a decade of experience across children’s residential care, supported accommodation, learning disability services, safeguarding, and safer recruitment, Carly brings a rare combination of professional expertise and lived experience.
Her journey into this work began long before Tiny Tools existed. As a mum navigating a rare autoimmune illness while raising her sons — one of whom became a young carer at just six years old — she saw first-hand how anxiety affects children, parents, and families as a whole. Those experiences shaped her commitment to early intervention, emotional safety, and accessible mental-health support for every child who needs it.
Before founding Tiny Tools, Carly worked her way from children’s support worker to Residential Manager, building high-quality, trauma-informed environments for vulnerable young people. She later used this experience in senior recruitment roles, helping children’s homes across the UK build safer, stronger teams. In every role, her priority has remained the same: understanding behaviour through empathy, neuroscience, and the patterns underneath — not punishment, labels, or judgement.
Tiny Tools for Big Feelings CIC was created as a response to what Carly saw repeatedly in homes, schools, and families: anxious children being misunderstood, overwhelmed parents being blamed, and stretched services unable to meet increasing need. Her mission is to bring early emotional-regulation support back into the heart of communities — through coaching, therapeutic art, school interventions, parent programmes, and accessible tools rooted in the STILL Method.
Carly holds qualifications in Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, an HND in Health and Social Care, DSL safeguarding certification, Safer Recruitment training, and ACCPH accreditation in the STILL Method. She works with children aged six and above, parents, adults, schools, local authorities, at-risk youth, young carers, and community organisations across Wirral, Merseyside, and the wider North West.
Driven, compassionate, and relentlessly focused on impact, Carly brings warmth, honesty, and practicality to every session she delivers. Her approach is simple: small tools, big shifts. When children feel safe, understood, and in control of their emotions, everything changes — at home, at school, and in their future.
Teaching emotional skills that last a lifetime
For more than a decade, Carly has been helping children and families build emotional resilience through tools that really work. Her calm, compassionate approach gives children confidence, helps parents feel supported, and creates safer, more regulated spaces for learning and growth.
