It always amazes me how timely life is, despite my particular talent at procrastinating. Although I had waited several months for a meeting with Marie Huxtable the morning we finally met was exactly the right moment to begin my journey of recording my account, an autobiography, a dissertation, a thesis? What it will turn out to be is not the important part, it is writing it down, capturing it as something other than the ideas I spout off to anyone that will listen.

 

Unusually I’m someone who likes myself. I find myself an exciting and interesting person to be around. I would like to tell the story of how I came to be the me that I am today, as I believe it is an interesting and inspiring story. It’s not just me who thinks this, I have been told so many times before by other people who have listened to parts of my story that I really should write a book about it. So whatever this becomes at least I am finally writing it all down.

 

I work with young carers, managing a service in Bath and North East Somerset. I hold a participatory value base and have been working for 4 years to enable the young carers I work with to design a service that they would like. I see my role as an enabler of their ideas. Although I have a lot of ideas myself I try to only use these to enhance what the young carers want. As a result I enable the young carers to choose the short breaks they want make funding bids themselves and spend their own budgets. I listen to their problems and then empower them to make their own solutions. 

 

Currently we are launching school packs. I initiated this idea because I was hearing from so many young carers that they were having negative experiences in schools. As I had a social work student starting she created the extra capacity to run this project and we put together some consultation days and looked at what would be useful. An information pack was designed by the young carers and my student Corinne put together their drawings and the information they wanted into a format and a draft policy for schools to instigate. A number of young carers felt confident enough to launch these in their schools with a view to sharing this with their peers and training the staff. To me this is the full cycle of participation and is something that is not just embedded in my practice but defines it.

 

Perhaps you are thinking that this isn’t exciting and what does it have to do with me, my mad mum and others? Well it is my experiences in my life that have led me to work like this and hold these values. My social work students are taught to locate themselves before they start a piece of work. If I had to locate myself this is how I would do it in a paragraph. It will take me the rest of this book to untangle it.

 

I am a 29 year old female, 1/8 African, 1/8 Polish, 1/8 Scottish, 2/8 German, 3/8 English (but they never give space for that level of detail on those equal opportunities forms). I am both middle class (my foster parents own their own business and I have a BSC Upper Second class degree in Psychology and Social Policy) and underclass (my biological parents both had/have schizophrenia, have been/were unemployed for most of their lives and at various points have been/were drug addicts and alcoholics (my dad is dead)). I was fostered at 3 and half, in my foster family I am the youngest and have 3 older brothers, in my biological family I am the oldest with a brother with the same mum and dad and a sister with the same mum and a different dad. As a result I am also a middle child! I am heterosexual although in my early 20’s I did make some experiences with a female friend. I am an atheist although I was once a born again Christian and I do believe in my amazing brain which is capable of being what some people would call spiritual. I have no physical, mental or learning disabilities that have been diagnosed by white, western medicine, although I suspect other cultures may have something to say about my health! I vote Liberal Democrat although I have voted Green Party but believe politics in Britain needs to make a stand for justice. I believe in justice.

 

My life has located me in such a way I refuse to be put in any boxes and I work in the method I do because the label ‘young carer’ tries to box in the children and young people I work with. I work to enable them to not to be kept in that box but to design their own futures and solutions.