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United Welsh Voice
Start date: May 1, 2016, End date: Apr 30, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

This project, based in Wales, UK; has been developed and informed by young people who have direct experience of the care system. These young people have informed us that they wish to enter into structured dialogue with decision makers responsible for the development, design and implementation for public services which seek to support those who are, or have been in the care system to achieve physical, emotional and social wellbeing.This resonates with the identified need by stakeholders to respond to the Social Services and Wellbeing Act (Wales) 2014 – which places a responsibility on service providers to ensure that they involve service users in the planning and development of services, to meet both an individual and collective need. This is directly aligned to the work of Voices for Care over the past 25 years.The activities included in this project involve young people who have been, or are in care, in preparing content (based on their personal experiences of issues faced and personal aspirations), which will be used to inform a range of structured dialogue sessions with those responsible at local and national government level with the delivery of social and wider public services.The project will engage with a total of 281 participants across 5 activity themes. Of these 281 participants 193 will be younger participants, all of whom can be regarded as having fewer opportunities given the experiences that they have faced as care leavers. This is illustrated in a range of evaluative studies which highlight the poor performance on this cohort across a range of wellbeing indicators.The remaining participants comprise of those from service providers including public sector decisions makers and service planners, support workers and service deliverers and facilitators from Voices from Care.The 5 activities of the project can be described as –1. A Question Time style event – enabling 40 care leavers to post their questions and opinions to national service planners.2. Positive Care ID preparation – working with young people to prepare the event outlined below.3. A Positive Care ID event – creating a day-long workshop facilitated by care leavers – for local and national service providers.4. Influencing and co-production – young people developing and preparing a suite of training materials exploring what it means to be a care leaver in today’s society and how corporate parenting can be improved – and co-delivering this to corporate parents on a regional / local level.5. Board meetings – enabling a representative group from the project participants to work with the Boards of Trustees from Voices from Care to ensure that project activities complement and informs the wider activities of the organisation.The project shares a universal methodology that young people identify the content and issues to be addressed in preparatory sessions. They are supported by experienced workers from Voices from Care to develop their communication styles and to present their work, and more importantly their issues to decisions makers.The project seeks to –1. Improve the life chances of those who are, or have experience of the looked after system in Wales (and across the UK / Ireland through Voices from Care’s 5 Nations project); this will be achieved through service planners being more aware of – and responding to the needs of care leavers.2. Develop democracy and citizenship skills amongst young people from the looked after community. These skills will remain with these young people as they progress to independent living enabling them to play a full role in public life, even potentially progressing onto engaging with public appointments.3. The development of a range of skills including communication, teamworking, problem solving – along with building motivational skills and aspirations with care leavers who are often marginalised in society – this will help these groups to access their lifechances.4. Delivers ASDAN qualifications and Europass Curriculum Vitae (CV) to 100 of the young people.In short this project seeks to re-dress the long-term inequalities that those who are, or have been in care face accessing their life.

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