A blog on advocacy for care experienced young people by Luke Rodgers.
Luke Rodgers is the Director & Founder of Foster Focus, starting his life in care - he like many other children, unfortunately, didn't feel his experiences were positive ones. After moving from foster home to foster home, living in children's homes and in and out of schools Luke found himself independent, living in a B&B at only 15 years old.
Luke wanted to make a difference to children's lives in care, he told himself that he 'didn't want other young people to experience what he had', and since has been sharing his story to a variety of audiences.
Today, he discusses how to actively encourage participation from young people:
Advocacy for young people who have experienced care is something we all strive to provide and get right. Every organisation I have met and worked with will all share passionately how advocacy for young people is the top of their agenda and how they focus on consultancy and ‘user informed’ practice to design services.
The quality of advocacy varies across the UK, some of the projects I’ve worked with are outstanding examples of innovation in advocacy and participation. The House Project sees care leavers acquire void properties, renovate them independently and take full ownership of their independence journey, with a team of individuals behind the young people supporting them if they need it. This project started with 10 houses in the first year and now works with 60 young people with 60 houses across six local authorities. Not only does this project give young people full ownership, decision-making power and a support network, it also makes financial sense. On average, it saves a local authority £165k per child, providing savings to sustain the project and repeat again and again.
Oxfordshire County Council has a co-operative community interest company that has been set up by care leavers to advocate for looked-after children, providing events for children in care and care leavers to gain information about their rights, opportunities and to speak to like-minded individuals. They are developing a peer-to-peer coaching service so care leavers can coach children in care and a buddying service where organisations can sign up to provide a ‘buddy’ to support care leavers in the workplace.
Much further afield in Argentina, care leavers have developed an app so that they can communicate with each other, share information about opportunities and events and also speak with their version of personal assistants. Taking advocacy to the digital platform and creating a modern method to communicate ensures young people can create a strong community, build relationships and be accessible when they need each other.
The common strand to all of these projects is what I believe the fundamental drive to successful advocacy is - ownership. Of course, for any authentic advocacy, we also need effective participation of young people. It’s a complex puzzle to get right, too often we fall back on the traditional children in care council asking young people to come to us, order pizza, consult on things our service has already predetermined and provide little feedback and no noticeable change. A powerless group of young people who are given the illusion of change will never provide authentic advocacy, only an opportunity for Ofsted to tick a box and convince others that we have ‘captured’ the views of young people.
So how do we get it right? I am by no means an expert, I’m just a master of trial and error and I can share with you some effective ways that I’ve seen work in the past. I believe that if we get participation right, advocacy will follow. I’ll share how to develop effective participation streams for young people and to understand what it actually means.
Advocacy comes in many forms; young participation is the foundation to allow this to happen. It’s not something that we can just do, it’s something that needs time, dedication and often some resource. All of those things you will read and likely think you don’t have.
With anything you do within your local authority that benefits young people, ask yourself three simple questions:
See your projects not as youth participation activities, but as mini social enterprises that you’re developing. The switch in focus will allow you to really explore what is needed and if it is sustainable.
A good example would be our fostering recruitment programme. We were approached and asked to consult with young people regarding fostering because a local authority's service was very poor with low outcomes. Through running a number of fun actives with young people we heard through stealth consultation that foster carers need more training and young people wanted more choice of who they live with. We talked about a recruitment campaign and decided to create a youth lead fostering recruitment drive, using only social media to raise awareness. Young people then engaged in two weeks of film and photography training, film-making, production and editing films. They interviewed foster carers about their experiences and care leavers about theirs. The films were produced into a number of short films that were used to raise awareness of fostering with the aim of gaining enquiries and to be used in training for existing carers, focusing on fostering teenagers. The skills and enjoyment young people took from this project was great, they had ownership of the idea as well as backing and senior leadership buy-in to do it. They had a diverse platform of people behind them from all areas of the council including customer services, HR, marketing and the fostering team. The result was an increase in inquiries by 400% in three months, the conversion rate stayed the same, but never the less we gained more carers and it showed us we needed to do more work on our journey from initial enquiry to the fostering panel. This authentically developed a project with improved participation, which created social impact and had clear financial benefit, and we had no idea we were going to develop that until we got young people together from similar backgrounds, had fun and encouraged ownership over naturally flourishing ideas.
Advocacy isn’t as complicated as we need to make it, bring young people together, have fun and follow their ideas.
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