Brent Care Journeys
Brent Care Journeys is pioneering strategic alliance between Barnardo’s and the local authority of Brent. It is unusual for the statutory and voluntary sector to come together in this way, but we need to work innovatively to support some of the unacceptably entrenched, and simultaneously unprecedented, challenges faced by young people today.
Barnardo’s are making this investment into the borough to enable partnership working with young people who have grown up in the care system. We know that our services across the UK make a huge impact to the lives of children and families every day, but what we want to learn more about is how to address the need for systemic change, by giving more power and agency to the people who have true lived expertise of the issues at hand.
We achieve this incrementally through a fundamental belief that empowering relationships can be a pivotal place of change. We design, test and implement together; we employ young people who have grown up in care to be the change that they want to see; we learn reciprocally and with mutual respect; we listen, and we give centre stage to the least heard.
Outcomes for young people who have grown up in care are unacceptably poor and we exist to reverse that.