We celebrated Black History Month with a course on transracial fostering

To celebrate Black History Month in October, our Heywood team ran an introductory course on ‘Transracial Fostering’. The purpose of the day was to come together to celebrate Black History Month and talk about fostering across different cultures and in particular how caring for black children, especially with health care, can differ to non-black children. Here at Capstone (North), we have a growing trend of carers caring for children from different cultures. In our care, we have children from eastern European backgrounds, British Asian/Muslim, and we also have white British children placed with our British Asian carers. We’re proud of our diversity and our carer’s willingness to take in children from different cultures and backgrounds into their homes and it’s important we support them with this. The topics that were discussed included:

• An overview of current policies and legal context around transracially placed children
• Explore the issues of caring for transracially placed children
• Identify methods of working with children to promote their self-esteem and cultural identity
• Illustrate to foster carers that love is not enough when meeting the needs of transracially placed children.
• A demonstration of products used to care for black hair and skin.

It was a fabulous day and really insightful for both carers and staff. One of our lovely foster carers brought in Caribbean food for participants to taste and find out where to purchase it. This first course was to understand  how useful this type of course could be to foster carers and we are pleased to announce that we planning to roll out the course for to our other hubs in the North from March 2020. Details of this will be confirmed nearer the time. We received some excellent feedback, such as:

• ‘’I will take a lot more care in language I use and be more aware of indirect racism’’
• ‘’I am going to research the heritage of my children and try to introduce them with knowledge’’
• ‘’I felt comfortable asking questions without any worry’’
• ‘’Promoting Black History Month’’
• ‘’Really engaging and humorous’’