A window into care leaver communities

This year around 10,000 looked-after children will age out and leave care. The age at which this happens is kind of inconsistent depending on where you live in the UK. As of May 2014, in Scotland you can stay in care until you turn 21 with further support up to 26. In England that age is 18, but fostered people can make use of a ‘staying put’ arrangement if they're aging out of foster care and not residential care.

This issue is still being debated across the country, but in my opinion it detracts from the main point. There’s nothing to stop an anguished teenager deciding to leave his or her care home on their 16th birthday. And when that teenager realises the world is a dark and scary place and needs to return to the warmth of a safe home, they’ll meet a closed door. That teenager’s a care leaver now.

The odds are so stacked against younger people these days that newspapers have started referring to us as ‘the boomerang generation’; many young adults find they can’t make it on their own and end up moving back in with their parents. It’s important to remember that as a group of young people, care leavers are among the most traumatised in the country. It doesn’t matter if we’re 16, 21 or 26 – when we have our support network cauterised, we’re going to struggle.

Research by youth charity coalition Access All Areas (made up of Barnardo’s, The Care Leavers’ Association, The Prince’s Trust and The Who Cares? Trust) found that care leavers want better housing, employment training, financial support, and mental health service support.

With so many needs going unmet it’s no wonder we’ve started banding together to form support groups. Many of us contribute and belong to at least one of the many, little-talked about care leaver communities out there.

As a former Foster Care Associates (FCA) care leaver, the first support group I ever attended was an FCA care experienced consultancy outreach project. Afshan Ahmad, now a colleague at The Rees Foundation, bought this group of younger care leavers together. I enjoyed the work, and I enjoyed the sense of community that came with it. For the first time in my life I had peers who’d shared the experience of being taken away from home and placed in care.

This was a group of people with not just a shared experience of the foster care system, but they’d also all had the same corporate parent. In a very real sense they were all members of that FCA care leaver tribe.

The Rees Foundation is working to build an inclusive space for this community to meet. But these care leavers still meet up informally. One of our care experienced professionals, Keilagh, recently gave birth to a baby girl. Her extended family of care experienced people have been in touch to wish her congratulations, check on her and her baby, and give gifts of baby clothes.

I had the privilege of meeting another community of care leavers this summer at a Care Leavers Association national gathering. They were older, wiser and more experienced than care leavers I’d met previously. This group wasn't just made up of young care leavers. There was a real emphasis on emotional support, and I was at times overwhelmed by the honesty and sincerity of these people.

Care-leaver communities exist up and down the country as well as online, and by far the biggest community of care leavers that I’ve come across is the place where these two groups of people both meet. The Care Leavers Rock group on Facebook has grown to over 250 members from across the UK and overseas.

I’ve been working with the Care Leavers Rock community to make sure they have access to our digital resources like our opportunities board and our crowdfunding platform to support the spirit of reciprocation and community which exists there.

So why do these groups exist? Two reasons: first, because especially when support can be lacking elsewhere, they are needed. And second, because experience of the care system can often foster a spirit of reciprocity. And that’s something we should shout about and encourage.

Cameron Forester, is a care leaver working for care-leaver charity The Rees Foundation