A Keeping The Promise to brothers and sisters event is being held on Friday 9th June.
It will be held at the premises of Siblings Reunited (STAR) at East Flisk Farm in Fife.
The event, which will run from 10:30am to 2:30pm will focus on data and implementation.
More information is available here.
If you are interested in attending, please email karen@siblingsreunited.co.uk
Siblings Reunited (STAR) will feature on television on Thursday evening. The charity which reunites brothers and sisters separated in the care system, will be the focus of a 30 minute programme on STV’s Scotland Tonight show.
Following a film about the Fife-based charity, there will be a studio discussion.
Stand Up For Siblings Chair, Kate said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the work of STAR which does such amazing work.”
The programme will be aired on Thursday 18th May at 8.30pm on STV.
STAR, Siblings Reunited recently celebrated its milestone 10th birthday!
The charity has been helping brothers and sisters to meet up together for a decade now.
The award-winning Fife-based charity works tirelessly to ensure brothers and sisters get to spend quality time together.
To mark the milestone, Kate Richardson, who leads the Stand Up For Siblings partnership has created a Just Giving page to encourage people to donate to help STAR continue their amazing work. You can donate here.
Strathclyde Hidden Voices are holding their third annual conference in May. The online event will take place on Saturday 20 May from 10am-12.30pm.
This year speakers include Dr Kirsty Deacon and Jennifer Ferguson.
Dr Kirsty Deacon is currently a Research Officer with the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration, working on a two-year partnership project with Families Outside exploring care- experienced children and young people’s experience of sibling imprisonment. Dr Deacon will be sharing her current and previous research with us regarding the impact of sibling imprisonment on children and young people.
Jennifer is responsible for the national co-ordination and provision of support to existing prison visitors’ centres; project management of Scottish Ministers’ funding for visitors’ centres; and development of new prison visitors’ centres in Scotland. Before joining Families Outside, Jennifer worked within a local authority Criminal Justice setting for eleven years, and prior to this within a statutory homeless assessment team for two years. She also volunteered within her local Children’s Panel for ten years.
Delegates will then come together in breakout rooms to explore common misconceptions, share our experiences and think about the ways we can use what we have learned to have an impact on the families and communities we work with.
You can sign up for the event here.
As part of Kinship Care Week 2023, Kerrie, a kinship carer and family worker for a Kinship Care Team within West Lothian explains how important it is to listen to carers and reflects on her own personal kinship journey. Read her blog on the Kinship Care website.
“Devastating”, “damaging” and “broke my heart”. These are just some of the words care-experienced young people have told the Staying Connected project.
These young people, who are currently serving a prison sentence themselves, have used these words to describe what it feels like to be separated from their brothers and sisters.
Sometimes this has been through the fact that they are in prison, but it has also been where they were in different care placements when they were younger, or where one of them has been in secure accommodation.
The Promise recognised the importance of sibling relationships and that they should be “respected and protected”. Recent sibling legislation also means that local authorities now have a duty to ensure that siblings are supported to stay together where appropriate, and where they are unable to stay together that they are able to keep in touch and maintain these relationships.
The Staying Connected project is a joint project between the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) and Families Outside, and explores where siblings cannot be together, where one is care-experienced and one is placed in secure accommodation or is in prison. While this may affect a relatively small number of children and young people within the wider care-experienced community, we know almost nothing about these experiences of separation. They are a group who are often overlooked but yet this unique type of separation has the potential to be significant within their lives.
The project team is coming towards the end of the data collection phase of the project, but researchers are still looking to speak to the following groups of people:
The project team has a group of care-experienced young people working as Consultants on this project and they have created a video explaining what taking part in the research involves for children and young people. Thanks to Aimee, Chantelle, Chloe and Michael for designing the video and in particular to Chantelle for all her work on actually creating it. It looks amazing and please check it out!
If you are interested in taking part in the research, work with groups who might be interested, or just want to know more, please get in touch with the project researcher Kirsty Deacon via Kirsty.Deacon@scra.gov.uk or call 07494 675189.