Nurturing creativity: Blue Cabin’s Creative Life Story Work programme

Since 2016, Blue Cabin have been nurturing meaningful relationships between care-experienced people and the organisations in their lives.

By ‘care-experienced' we mean a child or young person who is being cared for by their local authority. Our reputation as an experienced and established sector leader is growing, we are the only creative charity in England which focuses all of its work on the care-experienced community.

We support care-experienced people and their carers from across the North East of England to build meaningful relationships with one another by offering them regular opportunities to play, create, connect, and experience joy together.

We underpin our practice with an awareness of trauma and the impact that this can have, as every care-experienced person is likely to have faced a range of adverse childhood experiences. Our project participants tell us they have more confidence, improved wellbeing and that their relationships with others are stronger as a result of taking part in the activities we facilitate.

Right now our youngest participant is only 12 weeks old, having come into care soon after they were born, and our oldest participant is a 24 year old care experienced young man in Deerbolt Prison –where over a half of the population has care experience.

We have a number of multidisciplinary associate artists who are experts in working with care-experienced people and the adults in their lives. They facilitate activities which support them to express themselves, develop confidence and agency, build trust in others, and increase their skills and knowledge. Our online and face-to-face opportunities include stand-alone creative days, 1:1 mentoring, accreditation opportunities and long-term projects.

Since 2017, 900 care-experienced people have participated in our creative activities and projects alongside 900 of their carers.

Creative Life Story Work

Our Creative Life Story Work programme has been developed over a five year period alongside care-experienced people and in partnership with North East local authorities and Therapeutic Life Story Work International. It is based upon Richard Rose’s model of Therapeutic Life Story Work.

We set about this work because no national guidelines exist for life story work for children and young people in care. Local authority provision is therefore inconsistent across England and care-experienced people leave care with unanswered questions about their lives pre-care and their care experience. Creative Life Story Work sessions support care-experienced people in small groups to understand their present and the decisions made about them since coming into care.

Participants tell us that by taking part they have experienced improved mental health, have a better understanding of their identity, and improved relationships with people in their lives. Some have made big life decisions as a result of taking part and every participant would recommend these sessions to other care-experienced people. You can hear directly from participants and facilitators by watching this short film.

The Creative Life Story Work programme evaluation, was published In December 2022. This is the first report of its kind about life story work provision in England and we believe it has the potential to inform policy about life story work for local authorities across the UK.

We have also launched a new Creative Life Story Work website as part of our ambition to change the provision of life story work. We anticipate that these fantastic resources and training will develop the skills and confidence of practitioners and carers, change policy at a local and national level and improve care-experienced people’s experience of life story work and their long term outcomes.

To find out more about Blue Cabin, visit our website.