The TVF team has visited organisations and universities to take part in and facilitate conferences, meetings, and seminars. In 2016, we shared our testimonies at the Greater London Authority Beyond Care Conference.
These are some of the pledges that delegates made after hearing the young people’s testimonies:

  • Listen more

  • Lessen the paperwork

  • Fight for better housing for young people

  • Call more, text / email less

  • Listen more, talk less or talk to the right people when I do talk

  • Remind myself to consider young people as my own child

  • Find out more about the CICC in my borough

  • To turn all electronic gadgets off/on silent when talking with a young person

  • Hold management accountable for the needs being met for YP

  • Use the needs + wants of care leavers in the development of their educational provision

  • Support young female care leavers to financial independence by helping them find sustainable employment

  • Share with a target audience the successes of each project, and the evaluations by participants

  • Seek opinions of young people and adults who do not participate

  • Outreach to children I have never met/ heard from

  • Make more effort to build relationships with those not attending groups

  • Remember to value photos + try to use other media

Here you’ll find documentation of events and training where TVF team has performed, advocated or presented its methodology around the UK.

Training

Queen Mary University of London

QMUL Senior Common Room event, October 2018. This was a cross-sectoral TVF event to share testimonies on experiences of care and care leaving. Participants included University lecturers and academics, student welfare and access to university staff, and professionals from Local Authorities, including Social Workers and Children’s Services Managers.

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Training

Wandsworth Peer Outreach Team

Wandsworth Children’s Services Reflective Practice Session, February 2019 . TVF held a focused session for Wandsworth Children’s staff to share and reflect on professional practice.

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Event

TVF at Department for Education

Department for Education event, March 2019. This was a collaborative performative event with Wandsworth CLICK and the DfE. Audience members included: Head of Wandsworth Social Services, the Minister of State for Children, Nadhim Zahawi, and senior civil servants from the DfE.

“The system needs to be human….I guess my personal agency is how can I get the whole system to hear you? To actually listen to the uncomfortable truth, we have to listen, if we’re going to make the system respond and be better. And I will take that away…At the age of fifteen, or even at the age of twenty-one,  I couldn’t have delivered what you came up here and delivered to us tonight. I’m going to end by asking you to do one thing for me. And that is, come back again.”

QUOTE – Former Minister for Children Nadhim Zahawi

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Event

Our Hearings Our Voices Scottish Parliament

TVF has been working with the Articulate Cultural Trust, supported by Creative Scotland, to share creative practices with practitioners and professionals working with care-experienced young people in May 2019. In 2019, TVF worked with Our Hearings, Our Voice to support young people in their Exhibition and Event in the Scottish Parliament. The event was attended by Scottish Minister for Children and Young People, Maree Todd.

Training

TVF at the Office for Students , Bristol

In 2019, the TVF team travelled to Bristol to visit the Office For Students, who are the regulatory body for all English Higher Education. TVF ran a session with a wide variety of staff members from Fair Access and Participation, Equality, and Diversity, Student Engagement Managers, and Finance and Transformation. We shared a range of testimonies from care-experienced students about the issues they face in Higher Education, in order to inform the OfS’s regulatory framework.

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Event

Can you See Me? The future of listening in the care system

Supported by the Great London Authority’s Peer Outreach Team TVF invited stakeholders in the care sector to a full day seminar that they constructed with young people from CLICK Wandsworth, to collaboratively share findings, listen, reflect, and plan action in an event at the Mayor of London, on the 19th February 2020.

The event involved content devised from a series of arts-based workshops facilitated by TVF practitioners, artist Raphael Blake and activist and theatre maker Tommy Ross-Williams. This was an audio-visual exhibition of photography, poems and audios created by the young people, “Can You See Me?”. The young people led the afternoon of the event, taking the audience through ‘The CLICK Experience’.

In total there were around 100 participants, including social workers, government representatives, academics, NGO leaders and care-leavers. The project challenged the stigmatising and negative narratives that surround young people who have experienced care, showing their individual talents and potential.

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