Young Carers Action Day 2024 has been and gone, but that doesn’t mean SYC are going to stop calling for fairer futures for young carers and young adult carers! Catch up on everything that happened this YCAD.
YCAD kicked off with a first of its kind Young Carers Covenant being launched by the Carers Trust and Young Carers Alliance. The Covenant, a UK-wide commitment to young carers and young adult carers, aims to improve young carer’s lives and create fairer futures. Young people involved in creating the Covenant highlighted ten outcomes that are key to improving their lives. Any organisation or individual in a position to take action to help achieve these outcomes is urged to sign up to the Covenant. They could be national governments, local authorities, schools, colleges, charities as well as parliamentarians across the UK. Could you sign the Covenant?
Thanks to Sheffield City Trust, we were able to invite young carers from different schools, colleges and education setting across the city to a free ice-skating session at IceSheffield. For many young carers, their caring responsibilities mean that they don’t always get the same opportunities that many of their peers do; socialising, trying new things and being a care-free child just to name a few. This lack of access to opportunities, due to no fault of their own, can create a very heavy feeling of isolation for these young people, as well as have negative impacts on their overall health and wellbeing. We can’t thank Sheffield City Trust and IceSheffield enough for all their support in making the event such a special one!
Next up, we had a special blog from award-winning author Rab Ferguson. Rab, the author of the young carer meets alien adventure series ‘The Late Crew’, offered to write a blog for SYC to help mark YCAD. Rab is a friend of SYC and has read from his book at our AGM in 2022, as well as taking ‘The Late Crew’ on a Sheffield schools tour in the Summer of 2023. If you want to hear more about why Rab chooses to write about young carers and his upcoming sequel in the series, you can read his blog here. Massive thanks to Rab for taking the time out his busy schedule to write his blog for us!
Young Carers National Voice were campaigning once again this YCAD, relaunching their previous Carers Rights Day 2023 ‘7 Asks’! The ‘7 Asks’ were formed as part of the All-Parliamentary Party Group for Young Carers and Young Adult Carers inquiry into life opportunities and called upon services and organisations to look at what they could do better to support young carers. Author and Screenwriter Emma Kennedy joined YCNV by posting about their campaign on her Instagram! Emma wasn’t the only celeb speaking up about YCAD though, with Sheffield artist Pete McKee also joining in by posting the #YoungCarersActionDay! Young people and families that we work with currently have their artwork alongside Pete’s young carer inspired painting ‘Self Catering’ at our joint exhibition at Weston Park Museum.
As you can tell, Young Carers Action Day 2024 was brilliant; we haven’t even covered our social media from the day, our pre-YCAD training we co-delivered with Sheffield Carers Centre or the Pets as Therapy therapy dog group visit! We want to say a massive thank you to everyone who got involved with YCAD. Whether you joined our training, signed the Young Carers Covenant, made a donation, went ice-skating with your young carer group, engaged with ourselves/other carers charities on social media or got involved in a different way; thank you for helping to ensure fairer futures for young carers!
