Celebrating You

LIFESTYLE

Celebrating You!

Celebrating you is a space for you guys to tell us what you’ve been getting up to and to share anything you might be really proud of. We love getting stuff from you, so please send in your poems, stories, pictures, jokes or tell us about something you’ve done, your favourite hobby or a new pet, and we’ll include it in the next issue of SpeakOut.

membership@whocaresscotland.org 40 Wellington Street, Glasgow, G2 6HJ

Catching Up with Care Experienced Week

We ran out of space in the Winter 21 issue of SpeakOut to share what you’d been up to for Care Experienced Week back in October, so we thought better late than never. Celebrations for Care Experienced Week were held across Scotland, here’s a sneak peek into some of the week’s activities!

Celebrations in Edinburgh

Our Edinburgh Communities that Care team held a celebration for local Care Experienced children, young people and their families to connect with each other, celebrate and have fun. Participants got involved with a silent disco, arts & crafts, a special FX workshop, food and more!

Lanarkshire Showcase

Over in Lanarkshire, 18 creative Care Experienced members took part in a public showcase of their art.

This included baking, arts & crafts, and creative writing. One of the creatives in attendance, Amy, designed a doll’s house to help visualize what being Care Experienced can mean: “I decided to create a giant doll’s house, because it’s so easy to play with dolls in the same way it is to play about with a child or young person’s life. These dolls can be picked up and moved to the next room, and this is what inspired me to draw nine of the bedrooms that I’ve lived in – for me to highlight these major issues in today’s society, to create a better future for our children. Just imagine, if only I could superglue these dolls to the floor. Think about how much more resilient they would be – harder to knock over, and firmly placed within a single household. This is the future that we need to imagine for Care Experienced people. My hope is that if someone were to recreate my doll’s house in the future, there would be a lot less rooms.”

Shadow Friend

Lindsay Cook, East Renfrewshire APW

Poor mental health is something long prevalent amongst the Care Experienced community and other vulnerable groups. The added challenges associated with the Covid-19 virus has in many cases made it even more difficult to overcome these issues.

At the tail-end of last year, East Renfrewshire Champions board group collaborated with Youth Services and film making company Strangeboat Productions to create a short film highlighting these issues and young people’s thoughts on how best they could be supported. The film is all but finished - we are currently editing a response from East Renfrewshire’s ‘Healthier Minds’ Initiative which has brought together health, social services and education to explore and adapt their resources in the hope of making them more effective for young people and more accessible in a covid world. We are hopeful of releasing our short film in the near future.

Sadly, we didn’t have the space to include everything we created, however, we thought this piece of work was too good to be ignored. It relates to those out there who require more than a ‘...you just have to perk yourself up’ pep-talk. To those, having the right service at the right time is crucial.

My thanks to Nicole, one of East Renfrewshire’s champions board members and Care Experienced trainees, for her collaboration.

I follow this girl about—I live in her head—She can’t see me—but knows I’m here. She will never say it but I’m her best friend, so keep away. I make her feel bad; make her life more difficult—though I won’t apologise—it’s just what I do. Of course, she’s tried to evict me more than once but I’ve been here for a very long time. This place belongs to me as much as it does her—They think they can get rid of me with mindfulness and medication—They are wrong—when I see them coming I simply creep away and hide quite as a sharp-toothed mouse until it’s safe to come out again—And, the longer I’m with her, the stronger I get—and harder to shift. It’s all in the timing—just waiting for the right conditions to strike again—after all, I know what’s best for her, not you. Oh, and in case you didn’t know—there are many of us; far more than you know—there will always be a place for us, for we never, ever discriminate.

Calling All Care Experienced Young People in Aberdeenshire. Join the YPOC Group!

The Young People’s Organising and Campaigning (YPOC) Group is looking for Care Experienced young people aged 12 or over, living in Aberdeenshire, to join us.

The YPOC Group campaigns to make things better for other Care Experienced children and young people. We meet in Inverurie once a month, on the last Thursday from 4.30-6pm. We can organise to get you here if you live somewhere else.

We have pizza, we do some work and we have some fun. Just now we’re working on how to challenge the stigma that a lot of young people feel about being in care.

If you are interested in coming along please get in touch with Kate Ramsden at kate.ramsden@aberdeenshire.gov. uk or Laura Stewart at laura.stewart@

aberdeenshire.gov.uk

This is why Mellissa, Ashton and Karla like coming along:

“You get to chat with people who you can relate to.” “You get to meet other people with care experience from different areas and backgrounds.” “You get to have pizza for free!” “We get to go out and have fun activities when there’s no Covid.”