We spent a lot of time at Blue Cabin crafting our mission statement. It is the first thing you see on our website:
“We nurture meaningful relationships between care experienced individuals, and the people and organisations who are in their lives. Creativity is at the heart of all that we do.”
Genuinely delivering the aspiration that relationships should be at the heart of the system requires a focus on the practice of working relationally – how do we nurture, value and prioritise relationships? What does it take for individual staff and volunteers to build meaningful relationships? What does it take for organisations to make meaningful partnerships?
When we spotted an opportunity to be part of a Peer Learning Programme on Relational Practice led by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum we did not hesitate!
Happily our application was accepted and Blue Cabin are delighted to be in a group of seven local authorities and five voluntary organisations all working with young people with care experience. Each organisation has been asked to identify a project to use as a focus. We have chosen our Creative Aid project which we are delivering in partnership with Nepacs.
Creative Aid is a co-creation project with care-experienced young men in Deerbolt Prison, supporting the young men to be recognised as artists. To support relationship working within our organisations, both Blue Cabin and Nepacs are embarking on becoming accredited trauma-informed organisations via the Working with Trauma Quality Mark.
For the next year we will listen, learn and collaborate with others who share our belief in the importance of relationships. No doubt we lean on one another in developing and applying relationship centred practice.
We are looking forward to some rich conversations.
You can see more about the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s peer learning programmes here.
