Our Story

Why Are We Here?

Quilts for Care Leavers provides ‘quilted hugs’ to care leavers aged between 16 and 25 who are living independently after their time in local authority care has come to an end.

The facts about life after the UK care system are bleak: 1 in 5 homeless people have been in care and 1 in 5 care leavers go on to spend time in prison. Once discharged from local authority care, these 16-25 year old young adults are effectively on their own, often with very limited resources. In response, every year across the country, groups of volunteers host Christmas Dinner events for many of these young adults who would otherwise be spending Christmas Day alone.

Our ultimate aim is to be able to offer a choice of quilted ‘hug’ to every care leaver as they begin their independent lives. To do just that may take us some time, and exactly how we achieve that is evolving year on year, but we are working as fast as we can towards that goal.

Quilts for Care Leavers is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation set up “To establish in life and relieve the needs of young people, specifically those who are leaving, or have left, the care of their local authority and are progressing towards independent living, through the provision of a handmade quilt or other handmade object.”
Registered Charity Number: 1207069

Our History

We all like to think that we’ll be with our family and friends at Christmas. Some of us, through no fault of our own are simply not that lucky. In 2013, poet Lemn Sissay OBE, founded The Christmas Dinner, specifically for young people leaving the care system who would otherwise be alone on that day. In 2017 he established the Gold from the Stone Foundation (GftS), dedicated to offering support to individuals and agencies working to address the disadvantages faced by those in care and young adult care leavers.

Quilts for Care Leavers was set up in 2018 to offer ‘quilted hugs’ to guests at Christmas Day dinner events set up under the auspices of the Lemn’s Gold From The Stone Foundation. Their special size is so that it provides the hug that Lemn said he missed when he moved into residential care at the age of twelve.

Knowing how much comfort and delight a quilt can give, a small group of stitchers formed in October 2018 aiming to make a quilted ‘hug’ for each of the attendees at one of these festive events. In less than three months, they managed to collect 120 quilts, distributing 50 to the Manchester Dinner, 50 to Leeds and 17 to a smaller event in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

For 2019, Q4CL’s founder Maggie Lloyd-Jones set an ambitious target for the group’s first full year… 1000 quilts. The group grew quickly and very nearly achieved this number, gifting to all 16 Dinners that took place that year.

2020 saw it’s own challenges. Covid-19, successive lock downs, and social distancing touched every part of life. Dinner events that year transformed from social gatherings to luxury festive hampers delivered to the doors of care leavers on Christmas morning. In a year when physical hugs were scarce, we still managed to get ours through to all those who wanted them, albeit chosen by email!

Since Covid the Christmas Dinners have slowly returned and Q4CL have continued to gift quilts through them, as well as through other events attended by Care Leavers during the year. We are also now able to gift quilts through arrangements with Local Authority care teams, universities and colleges as well as charities working with young Care Leavers allowing us to offer a wider number of individuals the opportunity to choose a quilt. If you are working with young Care Leavers and want to know more about what we do please Contact Us for more information.

Make a donation

We welcome donations of fabric, time and money. We run a ‘fabric friends’ group to distribute fabric donations amongst our volunteers and are grateful for all the time and work that our makers put into their beautiful quilts. Financial donations go towards the costs associated with managing the project, such as web hosting, photocopying and event attendance, but all of the work at Q4CL is done by our fantastic group of volunteers. We also buy wadding and backing fabrics for our block drive quilts which go out to our volunteer longarm team to be finished.

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