We feel privileged to be part of a fantastic fostering community. Read more about our foster carers and their experiences.
We are proud of our fostering community and the incredible work our foster carers do for Brighton & Hove’s children and young people. We believe our growing and vibrant foster carer community is the best out there.
Our foster carers come from all walks of life and they care for children and young people of all ages. They are passionate about what they do and will talk to you about their experience at an information sessions, privately over the phone or in person.
Foster carers in similar areas are linked together. You will be introduced to foster carers who live nearby and invited to be part of a localised support network.
The Buddy Scheme is part of a multi layered approach to support new foster carers through their assessment, through panel and throughout the first 6 to 12 months of fostering. Our aim is to match new foster carers with experienced foster carers to ensure their first placements are a positive experience.
Matches are made according to a broad set of criteria such as geographical location, personality, family set up and the type of fostering that the new carer hopes to do. The scheme has been a huge success with close friendships often established along the way.
“We foster siblings. They’ve been through the same experience, and we love that we’ve been able to keep them together.
Our own children have been a massive part of our fostering journey and we couldn’t have done it without them. They enjoy the days out that the Fostering Support Team offer, and they’ve always gone along and made new friends. It’s nice to know that our own children are cared for just as much as the children we foster.”
“We foster pre-school children, ranging from a few weeks old to 4 years old.
We love being foster carers and we do it as a family because whilst they are living with us, the children we care for are part of our family. We do everything we have always done as a family and more. The children benefit from being in a stable, calm, secure family set up, where they are accepted as themselves and loved for just being themselves. This is what all children deserve in life!”
“For a long time, we believed we could not work and foster at the same time, and this stopped us from coming forward. We were amazed when we started asking our employers what support was available.There was a range of options, including being able to work flexibly.
If we had our own children, we would work, so it’s important to us to be able to work and foster because we’ve both built up good careers. For children, it’s normal for them to see parents or foster parents go out to work. We foster school-aged children so that we can work during the day and be there for them before and after school.”
“We were 17 and 11 when our family became foster carers. We love having young children in our house. We love to play with them, share experiences with them and share our home with them.
We have the chance to help children thrive. We give them a sense of belonging to a happy, positive, well-functioning family. We make them feel safe and loved unconditionally. We see them being happy and feeling safe, and we know we have made a huge, positive difference to their lives.”
“We’ve been fostering for 28 years. We’ve probably had 20 long term and over 100 short term. We generally foster teenagers. You see them growing up, becoming independent and moving on. You get to know them and they’re old enough to really talk to.
I was a secondary school teacher so I kind of know what might be going on in their heads, so it’s easier to communicate. We enjoy being part of their lives. For instance, they’ll come on holiday with us, and we see them have experiences that very often they’ve never had before.”
“When I think about why children might need refuge in this country, it really doesbring it home in terms of the amount oftrauma and difficulty they’ve have had to experience.
Hearing about it first hand from the boys we’ve cared for makes me feel more passionate about doing this type of fostering. It’s so rewarding to see young people who have arrived in Brighton, find their feet, and find safety.”
“I nurture the parent to nurture their child. I’m there as a safety net and as the weeks go by, I move further and further away until the parent is demonstrating that they can sustain looking after their baby and keeping a home.
I love it. I love babies. I’ve worked in a bank, and I’ve worked in an office, but with parent and child fostering I get a lot of satisfaction. I feel like I’ve made a difference.”
“I was able to make a real and lasting difference to the young person I cared for by providing a stable family home, and a warm, supportive, nurturing environment. Seeing the difference this made to his self-esteem and mental health was incredibly rewarding.”