Social workers & Parents

We started out attending a youth centre at a very young age, eventually after training we were given the opportunity to consult on what projects were available for young people, and then after doing that well we were given the opportunity to design projects, and after that to lead projects before going on to eventually lead the youth centres as a whole. We ran this successfully often generating numbers of 50-75 people per night on 6 different projects. A lot of these people had struggles such as being targeted at a very young age by gangs as well as being victims of abuse such as neglect and others. 

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Eventually while running the youth centres we started to recognise that while what we did was great. In some capacities we were solving symptoms of the issue instead of the illness itself. Young people needed support at home. After consulting with people more knowledgeable and qualified than us at the time as to how we could do this we eventually learned that we could support them through semi independent support services which is homes we could build for young people to live safely and happily and be supported. 

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Being blessed enough to learn about these things from a young age gave us the ability to plan our education degrees and future plans around this. Therefore we chose to study degrees that would aid us in the health and social care sector. We studied things such as Social work, child and young people development, Psychology and sociology, among other things such as history and accounting and finance. 

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While studying we wanted to develop first hand experiences of the business first hand so we therefore found employment as key workers learning about the front end and day to day aspects of the business while building our knowledge and experience and getting mandatory training from various organisations. We quickly developed from key workers to house managers and from house managers to managers again by listening learning and evidencing what we knew in practical and theoretical ways. 

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From management in other service we decided to work alongside others who had recently established their business in health and social care or was looking to develop one. Working together with them we were able to learn the back end of the business and develop practical understanding and methods of what is required to build and effectively run one. While we managed their service on their behalf gaining management qualifications as well as connections and knowledge. 

After operating as management staff and consultants for a number of years we finally had saved up enough money collectively to start our own. In that time we had achieved various degrees, worked as keyworkers, gained mandatory qualifications, did mandatory training, promoted to house managemers, managed services, consulted on businesses then developed services for others before finally making the choice to develop and branch off into our own. To build and run the service we dreamt of running to help young people all those years ago. 

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We were joined by a social worker who had worked in over 10 local authorise for almost 40 years playing management and consultant roles as well as being a qualified practise educator. A Nurse who was qualified both as a medical professional, as well as mental health and substance misuse, as well as other professionals like teachers and other health and social care professionals. 

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Later as we grew older but still wanted our organisation to be youth led, we added a group of former young people that were in our service as youth ambassadors and advisers to continue to be the voice of young people and consult us on the current issues and challenges that are facing young people as a whole but also those in our service in order to keep our service current and connected to the ground. These are seperate to our normal key workers.