Our story

Rehoming depends on people being willing to help, often in ways that happen long before an adopter meets their hens.

Someone needs to speak to the farmer and agree a date. Applications need reviewing, routes need planning and transport needs arranging. At the other end, collection point hosts need somewhere safe to receive the hens and time to welcome the people taking them home.

As our network grew, more volunteers took on those jobs. Local collection points brought rehoming closer to people’s homes, while farm teams and drivers connected those communities with farms further afield.

In 2019, we became a Community Interest Company, giving the organisation a formal structure as the work continued to grow. We remain an independent organisation run by volunteers. Our company record.

Lockdown in 2020 brought a level of interest we hadn’t experienced before.

People who had thought about keeping hens suddenly had more time at home. Egg shortages prompted others to look into it for the first time. We introduced our first waiting list, and by August, 9,480 people had registered, requesting more than 52,000 hens.

Speaking to The Standard, our operations director Jaki Hann described the continuing demand, with hundreds of requests arriving in a single morning and more farms coming on board.

It was an extraordinary moment for the organisation. Alongside arranging rehomings, we needed to help new keepers understand the commitment they were making. Safe accommodation still mattered, and we made clear that adopting hens came with no promise of eggs. Read the 2020 coverage.

Sometimes, someone joins us to adopt a few hens and finds themselves wanting to help with the next rehoming too.

That was Haidy Mansfield’s experience. She first adopted through Fresh Start For Hens in 2016, then began volunteering at rehoming days. By 2022, she was preparing to host a collection point in Hazelbury Bryan, helping other people in her community become adopters. Read Haidy’s story in The New Blackmore Vale.

That same year, one April rehoming saw volunteers help 3,403 hens from Macs Farm reach homes across England and Wales. Days like that depend on many people each taking responsibility for their part of the journey.

In 2024, BBC coverage followed 12-year-old volunteer Harriet and her mum Lynda helping at our Aylesford collection point. Read their story.

Today, we continue to work with British egg farmers to arrange rehomings across England and Wales. Our volunteers bring different skills and experience, but share a willingness to give their time to this work.

For our admin team, that means coordinating farms, applications, collection points and transport. For farm teams and drivers, it can mean early starts and long journeys. For collection point volunteers, it means organising handovers, keeping an eye on the hens and answering adopters’ questions.

Donations help cover the practical costs: purchasing hens from farmers, transport, equipment and veterinary care. Every rehoming also relies on the people who prepare a safe home and commit to looking after their hens for the rest of their lives.

We’ve grown since 2008, and there are many more people involved in making each rehoming happen. Our purpose remains straightforward: to help more hens leave commercial egg production and find homes where they’ll be cared for as pets.