Re-write Normal - Our New Fostering Recruitment Campaign
“It was normal to cry every single day, it was normal to scream and shout at each other, it was normal to punch each other in the face, d’you know what I mean?”
This week we are proudly launching our latest fostering recruitment campaign: Re-write Normal where we are asking people thinking about fostering, could you re-write what normal looks like for a child or young person in foster care? Could you make ‘normal’ look like kindness, patience, stability, consistency and love?
Our campaign follows the true story of Leigh* who has been in and out of foster care for most of her life. Leigh reflects on what ‘normal’ life looked like for her when she was in the care of her mum as a small child. She considers how her life might have been had she not come into care.
“There’s things that - now I’m like ‘That’s not normal, that’s not okay’ but if I’d been through that throughout my life, I wouldn’t have known no different.”
Fostering can be a real challenge for foster parents because the reality, often, is that they’re caring for children and young people who have suffered a great amount of trauma in their lives. We wanted to share the truth of what this can look like, so when Leigh came to us wanting to share her story, we felt it would be a great fit for a campaign.
We sat down with Leigh to hear her story in her own words and in doing so, the name and theme of the campaign came into fruition organically.
“Growing up was very difficult for me. I had some very difficult trauma, difficult life experiences… it was normal for my mum’s partner to just walk in the house, start crashing things, start smashing things, getting really abusive towards my mum - that was normal.”
To hear Leigh’s words and read more about our Re-write Normal campaign, click the button below.
*For anonymity, we have changed the name of our storyteller
