How we’re celebrating #CareDay22

It’s that exciting time of year again – Care Day (Friday 18th February), the world’s biggest celebration of children and young people with care experience.

Each year, our Participation Champions work closely with our children and young people to come up with fun activities to help celebrate Care Day and raise awareness of the needs of children in care. Our projects are always based on a theme chosen by our children. We’re thrilled to announce that this year’s theme is ‘Proud to be me’ and we can’t wait to share what has been created!

Although we love to collectively celebrate children in care as a nation on Care Day, we celebrate the achievements of our children every day, no matter how big or small. For this reason, we simply have too much we want to share, so we will be carrying on our celebrations and sharing stories, artwork, poetry, and music (and much more!) on our blog and socials throughout February and March and will be updating this blog post with more projects as they come in. Keep your eye on our social channels below to see more:

Celebration Activities for #CareDay22

Proud to Be Me Rap

One of the projects our young people have been working on in the lead-up to Care Day is a rap song called ‘Proud to Be Me’, based on our theme for this year. Our young creatives worked closely with Underground Studios and Soundart Radio to produce this fantastic rap, which you can listen to here.

100,000 Raindrops Song

As well as the Proud to Be Me rap, our children and young people were also able to work on another song called Raindrops. It has been great to watch our young people get so creative and express themselves through music. Listen to the song below.

Gender and Sexual Identity Guide

The Five Rivers Youth Council* decided to create a positive identity project to celebrate, explore and explain gender and sexual identity, and ahead of Care Day, our young people were able to contribute to something they were very passionate about, a gender and sexual identity guide for foster carers.

Children and young people across Five Rivers attended a workshop where their questions and queries about gender were listened to and these are shared in a booklet.

Together with this book, we have a podcast all about gender and sexual identity and exploring pronouns with young people. Listen to the podcast here.

Read the guide about gender and sexual identity here.

*The Youth Council at Five Rivers is a group of our young people who regularly meet to discuss topics that are important to them. They often take these topics to the Five Rivers Board, our Senior Leadership Team, and our CEO and Founder, Pam McConnell.

Illustrations

Earlier in the year, to accompany their ‘Proud to be Me’ work, our Youth Council went on a two-day residential trip where they created illustrations as part of their work exploring gender and sexual identity.

View the children’s illustrations below.

6 Word Stories

Also based on this year’s theme, our young poet laureates worked closely with the Royal Literary Fund to create short, but very powerful, six-word poems about their experience in care.

Read their six-word stories below.

Don’t forget to follow us on social media to keep up with our #CareDay22 projects, and our celebrations of our young people throughout the year.

Want to know how we celebrated last year? Check out our #CareDay21 activities where we had over 300 people at our event.