A week to celebrate our kinship carers

THIS Kinship Care Week from 3-7 October we will be celebrating the amazing role that kinship carers across England play in children’s lives and our society.

Kinship has worked with members of the Kinship Care Alliance such as Liverpool Kinship Carers, and partners to coordinate fun ways to celebrate kinship carers during this year’s #KinshipCareWeek.

The theme for this year’s Kinship Care Week is ‘Kinship Memory of the Year’ and we’re encouraging kinship carers to share their best memory of being a kinship carer from the last year on their social channels. It can be a video, photo, poem or drawing to highlight a family gathering or special occasion, or reaching a milestone like teaching a child to ride a bike.

Kinship carers make huge sacrifices to keep children within loving, secure, and stable families and the week is an opportunity to recognise the crucial roles they play in children’s lives and our society.

Kinship carers step up to raise children often in times of crisis when their parents can’t, to prevent them going into the care system. But unlike foster carers they are normally left to manage with no financial, emotional, or practical support.

Kinship Care Week gives us the chance to celebrate the incredible difference kinship carers make in children’s lives and urge those in power ensure that they receive the support they desperately need, to enable kinship families to thrive.

We remain fully committed to campaigning alongside kinship carers to ensure we make change happen and improve the lives of all kinship carers and their families, and we will not stop until this happens.

If you’re a kinship carer, or kinship group wanting to get involved, the charity has developed a free digital resources pack to help you organise and promote themed events like celebratory tea parties. It can be downloaded from https:// kinship.org.uk/get-involved/ kinship-care-week/

Dr Lucy Peake Kinship’s CEO