A safe secure environment supporting and empowering children
by Dawn Ives, director My Choice Children’s Homes has been operating since December 1999 and provides residential care to children and young people up to the age of 18 years, with social, emotional behavioural and educational difficulties.
My Choice is an owner managed organisation which has grown in the 21 years we have been operating from a single home to an organisation that now has nine homes and two schools, spanning three counties.
At my Choice we provide positive life enhancing opportunities for young people who are unable to live at home or sustain a placement in foster homes or conventional children’s homes.
Our experience of working in and managing residential homes and schools has led us to believe that children can grow and flourish in small family style homes and as such the maximum number of children our homes look after is four.
We provide a safe secure environment supporting children and empowering them to face and understand both issues in their past and present that may be challenging them.
Experience tells us all young people bring with them unique life experiences and as such we treat each as an individual being very clear about their specific needs. We look after the child not the perceived problem.
We continue to believe that this unique approach is why so many of our children flourish, they try new experiences, go on holidays with us, activities and enjoy many things they have never had the opportunity to do before.
Many of our children have lived in numerous placements prior to coming to us and present many challenges. A sense of abandonment, a mistrust of adults, attachment disorders and a history of abuse are sadly all too common.
It is our goal to change this for the children we look after and provide them a home and a place that they belong and feel safe.
As we have developed over the years, we have tried to involve the children in events and activities that bring them together, through this we developed our own ‘Summer Olympics’.
This is run throughout the Summer Holidays with the children taking part in various sporting activities, playing to win for their individual homes, while coming together with all the other children to have fun.
We also wanted to involve the children in supporting charities, we have done this through gathering gifts, wrapping them and handing them out.
This year we have chosen Chestnut Tree House, and everyone is working hard to gather as many gifts as we can to give to the children, families and staff who use their services.
They are especially excited to receive the following donations: New Toys New Lego Arts and Crafts Treats for the staff and families
And raffle prizes
This paper is supporting My Choice Children’s Homes christmas campaign and you can see our previous stories online on how to donate.