Moving towards gifting outside of Christmas: Kent
2023 – where are we going this year?
We are excited that 2023 is the year that we have started to grow more opportunities to gift quilts to young care leavers outside of Christmas. Q4 has always been clear that whilst we will always support Christmas Day Dinners for Care Leavers they can only ever cater for a percentage of care leavers. Because we want to reach as many young people as possible we have always aimed to spread our gifting further. This year we have started to reach out to areas where those dinners do not take place already and to reach care leavers that don’t attend Christmas Dinners. We wanted to share this example with you.
KENT : not just a Christmas Day Dinner!!
For a couple of years now, there has been a small Christmas Day Dinner in Folkestone, Kent, and last year about 26 hugs were gifted. Last December, about two weeks before Christmas, a social worker called Sarah contacted to ask if we could we gift hugs to some of the young care leavers that she worked with who weren’t attending dinners as well. This was going to be a close call to achieve at short notice, but we decided to give it a go. The amazing Jean Wife is one of Q4’s army of long armers. She currently lives in Essex, and was the quilt delivery co-ordinator for the Folkestone dinner. She was the natural person for us to call on to see if she could help with the request by Kent County Council, not least because she held quite the stock of hugs that she had either been looking after as coordinator for, or had long armed for local quilters. Jean also loves a ‘team tag drive’ (those of you who’s followed us for a while will know that many of our quilts end up being transported due to our fabulous members’ tag team efforts with many assignations having been arranged in supermarket cafes and motorway service stations). Busy as she was that December, Jean found a solution to achieve two deliveries, on the 22nd of December, meeting in a car park and exchanging both the dinner AND the Kent social services quilts.
In April this year, we were asked if we would increase our giving in Kent further. We were introduced to The Young Lives Foundation. The latter is now providing starter kits for care leavers moving into their own accommodation. We saw the plastic boxes on a zoom call, filled with things like a torch, tea towel, can opener and other vital items youngsters are not likely to realise they need. My comment was that our hugs wouldn’t fit in the boxes too! Photos were provided to 4 agencies (Young Lives Foundation, West Kent CC, East Kent CC, and Medway Council) for the youngsters to choose from. And in another car park, somewhere between Jean’s home and Kent CC social services’ offices, Sarah collected blue Ikea bags again, on behalf of all 4 agencies. 115 hugs, off to find their forever homes with more offfered as soon as stocks run low.
Keep on making, please!!
Even though Morsbags were not sent out this time, please still make: they are always used when we attend events, and especially when we gift more than 1 item e.g. hug and hottie cover. We don’t provide hot water bottles.
And please keep making hugs, especially those that the lads might choose: it is a strange fact that females often like the same hugs that the males do, but not often the other way around. And we know that there are more males in care than females. We can only spread our giving if we have more hugs than dinner guests, and the number of dinners increases every year.
Please do NOT donate Q4 badged/labelled hugs directly to your local council or charity: for insurance purposes we need to have control over what goes where. We try to keep them local to where they are made so far as we can.