The Nightline Association, the umbrella charity for Nightlines founded in 2006, has announced that it will be closing from June 30th 2025. This blog post is to reassure any and all Nightlines who are affiliated members of the Nightline Association that our commitment to always provide Three Rings for free to Nightlines remains unchanged.
If you’ve read many of our previous blog posts, you’ll know that Three Rings has a long history with Nightlines. Three Rings was founded all the way back in 2002, specifically to support the volunteers at Aberystwyth Nightline, and most of our volunteers have been Nightliners themselves – in fact, one was a Nightliner at Lancaster back in 1971: considering the first ever Nightline, Essex, only started taking calls in 1970, we’re pretty proud to say they’re still here, supporting Nightliners today!
When National Nightline, the volunteer-led umbrella body registered as the Nightline Association charity in 2006 Three Rings was already in use by the majority of Nightlines, and growing fast – the first release of the ‘Elements’ class, Milestone: Aluminium came out in July 2006. (The last of the 26 milestones in the ‘Elements’ class was Milestone: Zirconium, launched in March 2017: we’re now well into the subsequent ‘Rivers’ class, with the release of Milestone: Parrett taking place today!)
Still, as both Three Rings and the Nightline Association grew, we have stayed committed to our promise that no affiliated Nightline would have to pay for Three Rings. We regularly attended Nightline Association Conferences (and even blogged about it once!), provided technical support to the Association through enabling OpenID, and one of our earliest posts on this blog was by our Technical Lead, Dan, reminding people to never forget how great a Nightline is.
And Three Rings never forgets – because we were Nightliners once too. Almost everyone who’s been involved in building and supporting Three Rings over the past 23 years has at some point or other sat awake at 5am, listening to a student who, more than anything, just needs someone to talk to – and we’ve mostly become involved in Three Rings because we still believe in enabling others to take that call, or calls like it.
Today, Three Rings is an incredibly powerful volunteer management tool that helps power the incredible work of a massive range of charities and voluntary organisations from helplines like Nightline, Samaritans, and Childline to community shops, theatres and pubs, supporting charities providing Citizen’s Advice, services for the disabled, or vital Blood Bike services. We underpin work done at food banks and volunteer-run library services, and we helped literally thousands of volunteers at vaccination centres through our efforts to enable volunteering during the Pandemic.
We’ve come further than we ever imagined we would back in 2002. But we’ve never forgotten our roots.
The Nightline Association might be closing this June, but individual Nightlines aren’t, and Three Rings isn’t either.
And as long as Three Rings CIC continues to operate, Three Rings will always be available free to Nightlines.