Foster Care Fortnight 2023 – A recap

As Foster Care Fortnight draws to a close we wanted to take the opportunity to look back over all our activities from the past 2 weeks, and to say another thank you to our foster carers, for all their hard work and dedication in making a difference to the lives of the amazing children we look after.

You can click the video below to watch a short recap.

You can read more about each of the activities below:

We kicked off the week with a pizza and games night for our Fair Ways fostering family. We love being able to bring our community together to have fun and celebrate their achievements, in fact the team often say its one of their favourite part of their job. During this evening we had lots of snacks and pizza and played bingo and a memory game, as well as a family favourite beetle. We also asked people to fill in a little note to say why they liked being part of the Fair Ways community. It was great to see so many of our young people, foster carers, birth children and staff all having fun together.

It’s hard to pick a highlight of the week, but if we had to, we think it might be this. We were so excited (and slightly nervous) to be asked to do an hours chat show on BBC Radio Solent to help celebrate Foster Care Fortnight. Natalie Merriman, Our head of fostering as well as Siobhan one of our amazing foster carers spoke to the lovely Lou Hannan about fostering. We want to take this opportunity to once again thank Siobhan for agreeing to share her story so publicly.

Of course the show must go on even throughout the wonderful celebrations. On Wednesdays the team all get together for their weekly team meeting. This is a space for expertise to be shared which really helps all the young people and carers get the very best support we can offer.

Can we pick another favourite moment? The Spinnaker Tower abseil was another amazing event which raised lots of awareness around the need for foster carers in Portsmouth and helped raised extra funds for our summer fun activities. Another one of our brilliant Foster carer’s, Andy and and his birth son took on the challenge. They were extremely brave and made it look pretty easy. Members of out team along with their family cheered them on from the ground.

Every year the fostering network hold a foster walk so this year some of our team decided to take advantage of the beautiful surroundings at our office and walk around the the Lake at Lakeside north harbour.

Members of the team also attended the Fostering Networks Recruitment and Retention of Foster carers seminar in London. This was a great event that gave them a deeper understanding of the newly released findings from the fostering networks recent report.

Throughout the fortnight we held 3 awareness/recruitment stands in our local area to help spread the word about fostering and a career with Fair Ways. We met lots of lovely people and spoke about the amazing reasons to foster with Fair Ways.

Members of the team also attended the Fostering Networks Webinars on the Recruitment and Retention of Foster carers. This gave them another chance to have a look at the data and findings from the latest research and hear how LA’s are implementing these findings.

We also took the fortnight as a chance to post even more content on our social media. We find this a great platform to keep connected with our fostering community and also share information with people thinking about fostering.

It was a busy couple of week, but we all had such a lovely time celebrating fostering and all the joy it brings to so many. We would like to end this blog with a big thank you to all our amazing foster carers and members of the fostering community for all the hard work they do, you really are making a difference to the lives of young people everyday and giving them a brighter future.