In this blog, I am going to be talking about the impact that social workers have on care experienced people’s lives while both being in the fostering system and after, as for a lot of us sometimes we believe that social workers are not there to support us, but they try their best to make everything for us the best that they can. This blog is my own view and the story that I am going to talk about is how my social workers have impacted on my life as a care experienced person who has gone through the system both in care and now transferring into my own place.
Throughout my life, I have never really felt like I was ever good at anything, everything I ever did when I was at home with my mother and father was always judged upon like they were always disappointed in me or that I was never good enough for them. This gave me massive confidence issues and from this moment, I started becoming very secluded and isolated because I never wanted to do anything and feel that I was being judged ever again.
However, when I met my first social worker after I got out of hospital and got taken into the foster care, this all changed massively as they tried to get me to engage with other activities such as going to youth groups and meeting new friends, there was this one time, my social worker helped me attend weekend activities at the college, so I can engage with people around the same age as me, but the one thing that my social worker helped me to do was attend a summer vacation at the university of Bournemouth, where I spent a week learning and seeing what it was like to be a university student.
when my social worker was able to help me get into the summer vacation at Bournemouth Uni, I felt that I was able to focus and see what my future would be like after college, as a lot of the time during my final year of college I was thinking about applying and going to university, but never really felt that I was going to be able to go and did not feel that I belonged there, so to be able to go there and see what it is like and get a feeling for the place myself, it helped me see what potential and life I could have while being at university but also it made me understand what feelings I would get while being there.
Overall, for my social worker to do this and to help me attend, I felt humbled and emotional as to know and see that I have the potential to do this but also to see that other people see this potential too, it makes me feel extremely proud.
And this is the sort of impact that my social worker has had on my life while being in the system, as for a lot of the time I have had many different social workers which a lot of care experienced people might have had as well, but for every single one I had, they always made it their mission to me that they will be able to get to know me, but also help me any way they can. For me, they all helped me build my confidence and learn that I have the potential to do anything that I want to do.
So, from my experience we all know the type of struggles and issues that social workers have as there are not a lot of workers around, so many of the workers that work with us have a lot of other people in their caseloads, but what I find truly amazing is that even with all this extra cases to work on and the amount of people that they see every day, they were still able to help me overcome the issues I had with my self-confidence and helped make me into a better person that I am today.
By Anonymous Care Experienced Blogger
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