Coram’s Activity Days for Fostering (ADFs) provide a safe,fun environment for prospective foster carers and children to meet each other and explore whether they have a connection or ‘chemistry’. The days focus on finding loving, stable homes for children who need to remain looked after under fostering arrangements. The days are designed to make young people and foster carers active participants in their family finding process, enhancing the matching process and increasing the likelihood of a successful placement. The approach provides a unique opportunity to get to know each other authentically in a way that traditional matching processes may not. It is considered to be a particularly effective matching process for ‘harder to place’ children, for example those in a sibling group, children of a BAME background or with a disability. The events are arranged for local authorities, with the AdF service facilitating the event organisation, briefing sessions, a profiling workshop, management of referrals, consultation and feedback. The events build on Coram’s pioneering Adoption Activity Days (AADs), which have been running since 2012, and enabled at least 1,400 children to find adoptive families, equating to a match for one in every four children attending an AAD.
Coram also runs Sibling Time activity days, providing a chance to develop sibling bonds for children in care. An evaluation of ADFs was conducted by the Coram Impact and Evaluation team and funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Hadley Trust in March 2022. The findings were generally positive, with social workers and foster carers particularly enthusiastic about the approach. Many of the children who attended belong to groups that we would typically consider ‘hard to place’ and almost a third of the expressions of interest led to provisional matches.
https://www.coram.org.uk/what-we-do/our-work-and-impact/coram-activity-days/
If you are interested in taking part in one of Coram’s Fostering Connections events, please contact Adoption.ActivityDays@coram.org.uk