Our new Make Good & L!STEN programme is going great and we would love to tell you about what we have been doing!
First, let's recap what this programme is... Make Good (our friend Jen Samani) and PIE have partnered up to deliver this programme from October to January and have received the GMCA Shaping Care Fund to deliver this programme in Stockport. We are working with a group of care experienced young people (young people in foster care, young people in residential care homes and care leavers) aged 11-25. For this project it will be a space where young people can come along and complete creative activities and creatively share their views and experience of the care service. Young people will be able to connect with other young people in similar situations. There's lots of creative activities to get involved in e.g. art, making Christmas gifts and decorations, exploring clay work, banner making, photography, videography and many more! This is an opportunity for young people to become leaders in a youth voice and contribute to the future development of care services and for young people to be at the centre of shaping the Regional Care Cooperative.
So what have we done so far? Back in October, we had some furniture upcycling happening at the Make Good space. This was an opportunity for the young people to learn some skills on how to upcycle furniture. They learnt how to use their creative vision to transform a piece of furniture and make their own by painting and decorating it. This was a very peaceful and useful session for the young people as after working hard on their upcycling they got to take the furniture home with them.
Our next session was fabulous! For this session we got into the Christmas spirit with creating chritsmassy crafts to take home and creating things in preparation for our day at John Lewis. The young people created christmas decorations using cinnamon sticks and created positive christmas baubles for our positivi tree for our Make Good and Listen Day at John Lewis. Also, they made a cute positive Christmas bauble for a lady who works at Greggs across the road to say thank you for giving us extra food with our order because they ran out of yums yums - spreading some Christmas positivity in the community. This was a lovely session with fabulous young people.
On Saturday we had our Make Good & Listen John Lewis Christmas Day! The Make Good & Listen group got the chance to set up a stall in the entrance of John Lewis in Cheadle. John Lewis gave us a Christmas tree to set up on the stall where we hung the baubles the group made which had positive messages on. The group handed them out to the public and the public got to find out more about the Make Good & Listen programme. The group did an amazing job talking to the public and spreading positivity around the community!
Below we have a young care leaver who is a part of the Make Good & Listen group and Jen, who runs the sessions, talking about the importance of this programme and what it provides for the group:
"Coming along to these sessions It is a bit like therapy and has helped to make us feel acknowledged and listened to. It's been good to recognise things that have happened to us, and with people who have also been through it. Whilst some of the topics have brought up difficult emotions, releasing them in a safe environment has been really helpful. As a care leaver, it has been nice to be asked questions that no one has thought to ask before about how I have found the experience of living in care."
Jen - "These sessions have allowed the young people to explore their feelings around having been in the care system, and discuss and recognize their emotions through creative practices. We already feel like the project has helped to give these young people tools to process their emotions, that will help to support them to work through and regulate their emotions now and in the future. The chance to connect with each other and form new friendships has also been great to watch."
We have a lot more planned for this programme so keep a look out for any updates!!
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