Picture the following scene – you come home from school to find a stranger sat at the kitchen table. Immediately, your flight or fight kicks in; you’re wary of adults, and for good reason. You turn to leave, before spotting a lanyard around their neck. Your anxiety gives way to frustration.
You were expecting the new social worker to visit last week but no one turned up, even after you cancelled plans with friends – and now you’re just expected to give yet more of your time on their terms, not yours.
After a couple of minutes of small talk, you realise this is an individual with whom you have very little in common. They are nice enough. But your respective backgrounds, interests and ways of seeing the world seem at complete odds.
This is not someone you would voluntarily open up to and yet they already know more about you than you would ever willingly disclose. Without your consent, and simply by virtue of their job, they have read your files – a sort of ‘lowlight reel’ of your life.
As they regurgitate ‘risks’ and ‘concerns’ they must have read in your notes, you mentally switch off. It feels as though this is just a copy and paste conversation – same words, different professional. It’s clear the conclusions have already been made. So what’s the point of saying anything?
When they finally leave, you overhear a muttered exchange with your foster carer…something about you being ‘disengaged’. Yet another label which will be added to your files.
For children in care and care leavers, this is no hypothetical situation. So often, our stories are written for us before we have the chance to speak. And they are not always accurate, fair or kind accounts (something I know first-hand, having recently received my case files).
Beyond individual files, the pattern is repeated at a macro level, too. Headlines and policy documents written about (yet without) us dictate the narrative of who we are as a collective, entrenching stereotypes – despite each of our stories being unique.
Isn’t it time we had the last word?
Free Loaves on Fridays, an anthology which will collect stories, letters, and poems from care-experienced people of diverse backgrounds, aims to redress the power imbalance.
The aim of the book is to give a loud, clear message that care-experienced voices matter –that they deserve to have a place in the centre of book shops, and not just on the bottom of feedback forms which are read once and forgotten forever. Or worse still, in consultations where our voices may be cherry-picked and misinterpreted.
Free Loaves on Fridays deserves to exist, because there is a care-experienced gap in bookshelves, in parliament, and in the media. We are systemically denied access to such platforms; only 13% of care-leavers end up at university compared to 43% of the population – and the adverse outcomes don’t stop here. Whilst we’re underrepresented in education and positions of power, we are overrepresented when it comes to homelessness, the criminal justice system, and even cases of premature death.
The project will provide opportunities for our community to feel a sense of worth and achievement. To celebrate who we are and what we have overcome – and to see our names in print for all the right reasons.
Through this work we aim to touch the heart of the general public, including professionals – to increase awareness (and allyship), have a stake in our own story, and reclaim care-experience as something to take pride in.
The book is currently being crowdfunded by Unbound. Proceeds go to Article 39 and Together Trust – two charities who fight tirelessly for the rights of children in care and care leavers. Once we reach our target, we can finally begin to accept submissions from all care-experienced people – including, in fact especially, those who would never dream of calling themselves writers.
If you are able to support the publication of the book by pledging and spreading the word; your allyship will go a long way to turning up the volume of care-experienced voices. It will be an essential resource for ASYEs, social workers of all levels, and stakeholders,
This is where to learn about the care system from those who have lived and breathed it from the inside out. Not just from the top-down.