The Care Leaders are Leaders with Lived Experience who provide training, keynotes and consultancy that look to enhance the experiences of children in care and care leavers.
We are a mix of employees and associates who have a wide range of disciplines from marketing, branding, graphic design, human resources, legal, transformation, finance and more. Although we all have different skill sets, we all have one thing in common; we want to do good things, with good people for good causes and improve the lives of children in care and care leavers.
We believe all organisations deserve to understand the lived experiences of children who use them, however, services typically do this by asking young people to attend meetings, to fill out surveys or by inviting them to workshops to share their personal experiences. We don’t think this is a great because there’s very little we usually do with the feedback and asking young people to share their traumatic experiences to people they don’t know is just unethical.
The Care Leaders are different, as consultants our leaders can draw from both personal and professional experiences of children’s services to develop projects such as; ‘Middlesbrough Children Matter’ where we co-designed a vision for children’s services with staff and young people; ‘The National House Project’ and ‘Care Leavers National Movement’ where we supported the development of a charity for care leavers and a steering group of young people to guide it; and ‘Youth Voice Bucks’ where rebranded, restructured and relaunched a participation service for a local authority.
Through our 12-Month Fellowship Programme we support lived experience leaders and youth participation workers to develop their ideas, project or a business that supports young people. We have supported the development of projects such as; Care to Dance, a community interest company where social workers offer dance workshops to children in care and MyFutureSelf Matters a mentoring organisation where care leavers mentor children in care.
Our leaders have trained 10,000’s of staff from the UK, Europe and across the globe, on topics about including trauma, attachment and relationships. We have taught MBA Students in the University of Oxford about storytelling, given keynote speeches at the Centre for International and Strategic Studies, USA about impactful social work practice and facilitated virtual and face-to-face workshops to teachers, social workers, foster carers and many more.
We want to step away from a world where those who have lived experience are only known for their story, into a world where lived experience leaders can be recognised and respected as leaders. We will do this by bringing together leaders with lived experience and services to develop meaningful projects, facilitate training and keynote speeches that look to enhance the experiences of children in care and care leavers.
If you want to know more about The Care Leaders, book training or find a consultant visit out website at www.thecareleaders.com
