By Carly Glover
AT Jersey Cares our vision is love, belonging and opportunity. We work alongside people with experience of the “care system”, offering advocacy, activities and opportunities to bring about change. In this way we respond to the “here and now” of people’s lives, while not accepting things have to be as they always have been.
We recently reviewed all that we have learnt from offering advocacy over the past four years.
The themes which recur again and again are:
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Family
To spend quality time with family, with support to see brothers and sisters in “normal” ways.
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Education
To feel safe and supported at school, to have help to overcome barriers and progress in education.
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Knowing your own history
To have access to personal records, to see the full picture and for support to be provided for this.
The poet and author Lemn Sissay grew up in care. He said that when he was asked as a “child of the state” what sort of home he needed, he bristled at the question. He said he thought they should ask children in relatively happy homes what they had and seek to provide that.
What is striking about these themes is they represent things many children and families have without having to think about it terribly much.
Family: kin, someone with a vested interest in caring for you; someone who “loves you because they love you because they love you”.
School: the familiar opening of the curtains, tugging at the duvet at 7am to get a reluctant teen, or pre-teen, out of the door. But school is also where you learn, belong and are looked out for. The children we work alongside want to learn and go to school, college or university.
A child’s history: coming from the objects in their home, the patterns which just happen (“that’s dad’s chair”), the stories told and the stories you are swept up into (“come and learn to sew with me… I taught your mother at your age”).
The children we work with are asking to see more of their brothers and sisters, or are asking to have their “case files” (the records professionals keep about them) shared with them in a timely, thoughtful way and in a format they can understand. Their history, wrapped up in systems and processes.
That is why advocacy is so needed. A child’s access, or not, to a good childhood is determined by one-time decisions and ongoing processes of a range of bureaucracies which may be connected but may not be communicating. Colleagues have described this experience for a child as “ricocheting between the hard edges of bureaucracy”. Bringing the child’s voice and views into these processes is key to ensuring that what is happening is humanised and gentle. Working with the “system” to change these processes is key to enabling children to really thrive.
Adults find independent trusted people when they go through a high-impact situation they have limited understanding of – for example lawyers are used when buying a house or getting divorced. This should apply much more so to a child, at a time when they are likely to have experienced significant trauma and their world has been turned upside down.
Their “high-impact situation” might be “will I see my mum?”, or “where will I go to school”; or, in our context, “how do I feel about being asked to go and live in England?”.
I tell you all this in part because we are recruiting for an advocacy and participation worker. We need someone who is committed and tenacious enough to work in the here and now but capable, thoughtful and creative enough to work while thinking about “how things could be”.
We would provide training, mentoring and support. If you think this might be for you, please read more here: jerseycares.je/we-are-recruiting.
If you would like to support our charitable work in any other way, please do get in touch with our chief operating officer, Nicki Matthew, by emailing nicki@jerseycares.je or calling 07700 722011.
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Carly Glover is the chief executive of Jersey Cares, an independent organisation that listens to and amplifies the voices and needs of people with care experience. She has worked in community development for 20 years, with half that time spent in leadership roles. She has worked with people experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, struggling with literacy and being a parent and co-created projects with people affected by these issues. She holds a post-graduate certificate and a master’s degree in community education from the University of Edinburgh.
