Gifting At Universities

Preamble: I’ve always said that Q4CL would not limit its gifting to the Christmas Day dinners set up under The Gold From The Stone Foundation. We started from a small pool of hugs in 2018, and this has grown over the years. With 11,000+ young people leaving the care system every year, we are never going to reach all of them, but we’re giving it our best effort. Scotland and Northern Ireland work differently, and that’s another story waiting to be told!!

We reached about 30 dinners last year – not all GFTSF ones either, and gifted to several agencies. However this year i also wanted to focus on areas where dinners were not being held.

And then, we were asked if we might consider gifting to care leavers at a particular university. This seemed an excellent way to access another group of care leavers.

The idea began to develop. Care leavers/care-experienced young people are a hidden group, and never more so than those who decide to go into higher education. Discussions were held (zoom is a bonus), plans considered, re written, and tentatively put into place. Several universities were approached to test the water. Most universities but not all, have systems of looking after/mentoring their students, particularly those who are care leavers, care experienced, or estranged, and the UCAS forms enable applicants to tick that box if appropriate. Currently, we are specifically looking at those who are care leavers be it at 16 or 18 years of age.

Our test universities currently signed up include the Anglia Ruskin group, and the University of Manchester. Several others are at the discussion/development stage.

There are currently 2 main ways chosen by the universities to deliver our hugs. At Manchester we attended to deliver quilts at a welcome event (including the obligatory pizza), and during the evening we discussed even more effective ways to achieve our goal of gifting to young care leavers at universities. They have since had a second evening of delivery to a more specific group of students, and will also be able to offer quilts if appropriate during one-to-one support sessions to make sure those who didn’t attend the initial evening sessions are also included. Some of the fabulous quilts delivered by Marian Keall and Christine Hardman will be kept in storage by the relevant student welfare teams. They were all cooed over and marvelled about!! There were lots of indecisive students, too, but eventually all seemed to find the hug that sang to them loudest. And we had very happy Marian and Christine (and me, of course).

Maggie Lloyd-Jones