A while ago, I saw a post on damaged WWII aeroplanes. Somehow, that got connected for me to careleavers and how we need to do better for them. A strange connection, but one that increasingly makes a lot of sense. I’ll tell you why.
The post described how aeroplane builders inspected the planes that returned damaged from the front. They mapped out where they had been hit most by gunfire. Through the analysis, they found patterns of areas most often damaged. This led them to conclude that these areas needed to be reinforced and armoured more to protect them. However, a statistician pointed out that this was not the way to go. These were the planes that had stayed in the air and made it home, meaning that they had not been incapacitated. The planes that sustained catastrophic damage and crashed, were the ones that were hit in the areas that these planes had NOT been hit. To make the aeroplanes safer, reinforcement was needed in the areas that were undamaged in the planes that made it home.
When I read that, there was an immediate connection for me to how we approach care leavers. And over the course of a few days, the ‘how’ of it gradually became clearer to me.
The care-experienced people we hear from, the self-advocates, are the ones who have great strength and resilience. They face a lot of challenges and obstacles and they have trauma to overcome. It is necessary and useful to listen to their experiences and recommendations on how things should be done differently. However, they cannot give us the whole story of what needs to change. They are the ‘aeroplanes that made it home’.
We do not hear the perspectives, experiences, and recommendations of care experienced people who have gotten hidden away in prisons or mental health institutions, those who have gotten lost in severe substance abuse, those living and dying in the streets in total destitution, or those who lose their life to suicide. The care-experienced people we do not hear from need support and things that those we do hear from either have or have managed to find. Whatever the reason for this difference, we must find out what it is, to be able to close the gap.
We desperately need to hear from care-experienced people who are barely, or not at all, functioning in life. Not to push them onto a stage, make them self-advocate and become a feather in our cap to show how well we involve them. But quietly, behind the scenes, to find out how we can support them to make life more manageable and how we can prevent the next cohort from ending up in the same position. We need to find out what we are missing and what to work harder at. Only those barely hanging in there can tell us, if they are willing to.
We need to make more of an effort to find them and to hear them.
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