Originally in 1996 we only had four staff members, one phone and one office. We hand-wrote every child’s referral as they came through by phone, and in 2001 one of our main objectives for the year was to get every staff member their own email address. If only our annual goals were so simple now!
In 2001 we were proud to have overwhelmingly positive feedback from our foster carers only five years into Homefinding & Fostering being founded.
Today we have 13 members of staff, so we have grown quite a bit since then, but we still retain the same identity as a local, independent fostering agency and we make it a priority to have a familiar and strong relationship with all of our foster carers.
We have been privileged to watch hundreds of children thrive since we were founded. Those same children proudly share their achievements with us as adults and share the achievements of their children with us, making them part of the fabric of this agency.
Fostering is about relationships. We have built relationships with the community around us, we have excellent working relationships with the social services teams as well as the local schools.
But we are always looking to build more relationships with families, who have the potential to change the direction of a child’s life. We need families from more diverse backgrounds such as ethnic minority carers, LGBTQ+ carers and male carers who are all underrepresented in foster care. You may have the potential to help a child and we will welcome people of all backgrounds to foster and work with us.
We have seen many changes throughout the years, but one consistent problem in fostering is the shortage of foster carers across Britain. This has only gotten worse over time as the number of children entering the care system increases, but the supply of high-quality families is not increasing anywhere near the same rate.
Back in 1998, we had 200 referrals a month to place children with one of our foster families, in 2000 it rose to 500 and in 2001 it went to 700. Today at Homefinding & Fostering those numbers have shot up to 2500 referrals every month, most of which we are not able to help with due to the massive shortage of carers.
Britain is suffering from one of the largest deficiency of foster carers it has ever seen. If you can help tackle the shortage of carers, please get in touch.
In November 2000 we began a specialised scheme to care for unaccompanied children and young people from Eritrea and Ethiopia with the project head being a member of the Refugee Council, Dereje, who had many years of experience in assisting refugee children.
The scheme was extremely popular and well run resulting in incredible outcomes for the unaccompanied children coming to the UK as they were placed with our London carers from the Ethiopian community. The London project built lasting friendships between us and the Ethiopian community leading to us setting up a charity called The Yirgaalem Appeal in May 2005.
Yirgaalem is a town in southern Ethiopia, and when we set up The Yirgaalem Appeal, we sent over a group of staff who got to see for themselves the situation that the people and children were living in. This led to us investing in the building of a new school, updating health centres and supporting young homeless people to help raise the quality of life for people living in Yirgaalem.
Our staff had a once-in-a-lifetime experience which they will never forget and we are incredibly proud of the friendships and legacy we left behind.
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