Making a difference

I’ve always felt I should try and do something to make a difference  to the world we live in and for the people in it. 

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t pure altruism, I get something from it: A counter-balance to some of my labours that don”t have worthwhile purpose,  forcing me to be a bit more social than I really am,  a sense of ‘holier than thou’. But, whatever my dubious underlying motives, I genuinely hope that I have made a positive difference.

The one that was the hardest, but also the most rewarding, was being a foster carer. This wasn’t a solo endeavour by any means. My wife did most of the heavy lifting and my children also had to their growing-up impinged upon. It was also my wife’s paid employment for several years so it helped a lot with family finances.  

I spent the last an longest part of my career, such as it was, in Children’s Services, the somewhat hazy part of Local Government that tries to help children grow up  in families where they can be safe from abuse and neglect, feel secure and to cope wit difficulties they have.  My role wasn’t in the direct delivery of social care practice myself, (I don’t think I’d have been very good at it), but I was closely in support of it. Not at all profound after all those years working but as I think about it in my head  – Some children really do have shit lives, children want to feel they belong to a tribe – typically their family, a shit tribe is better than no tribe. 

Foster Care is the fall-out from  this – if a child’s own family, their extended family, friends or relatives cant take care of them the ‘stranger’ foster care (or much less desirable in most cases, care in a Children’s Home) is what’s left. 

I’m going to have to think about how to write about foster care. My motivations are again mixed, but what I think I’d like most is to make you or anyone think that maybe you could do something like this too in a formal or more informal capacity –  So I’m going to return here later.