Member News: Community Foster Care - Life Skills in Lancaster!

Last week was half term in Lancashire and in the BRAND NEW CFC office (any chance to brag about this), we hosted some of our children and young people to learn all things life skills!

There was pizza making, arts and crafts, volunteering in a care home for the elderly, shopping and budgeting and lots of laughter along the way!

​Our Supervising Social Worker, Sam, joined in the activities and said:

The young people were great. They were engaged and worked really well together as a group. Seeing them doing arts and crafts with the people at the care home was incredible, they made heart shaped decorations for each of them, finding out what they liked and the residents were so pleased! There were smiles all round that day, I was so, so proud of each one of them.

They are incredible young people and are positive contributing members of the community. They really picked up on how important this was and that it's linked to us being called 'Community' Foster Care, and this is why it was part of our activities. They represented our agency so well and should be incredibly proud of themselves!

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Our Support Worker, Rachel, who organised the activities said:

Most of us take for granted learning life skills and if, by the time we leave home, we don’t have that many we usually have family members or friends to call on for help. Children and young people in foster care might not have these support systems when they age out of care and if they find themselves moved from home to home, their learning is interrupted and may not be consistent, depending on who’s looking after them. That’s why it’s so important to host these life skills events, not only to give them the insight of what adult life is like but to give them the confidence to take on these tasks.

It was a brilliant couple of days delivering the Life Skills course to a group of young people in our new Lancaster office. It was lovely to see them interact, have fun with each other and engage in all the activities and challenges. We covered budgeting, responsibilities and much more!

On day 2 we had an interactive Q&A session from a care leaver who has gone on to be a successful businessman, this was aspiring for our young people. Seeing them in the Care home “giving something back to the community” was lovely to see. The residents enjoyed the Valentine’s themed activity and biscuits, whilst one of our talented young people played his keyboard for them. We had some great feedback from the young people too, they particularly enjoyed the food planning, shopping, prepping, and eating task!

A mind map of all things ‘Independent Living’ as written by CFC young people

Source:
www.communityfostercare.co.uk