The Importance and Relevance of Care Experienced Week | Blog by David Grimm
David Grimm is a newly qualified social worker based in Scotland. He is the oldest of 8 siblings, but is also care experienced and has formed bonds with many hundreds of other care experienced people. He is an activist, an argumentative but compassionate and articulate person with a passion for supporting care experienced people and others in need, when he can.
David likes to doodle and write poems, as well as playing video games to socialise and perform self care.
David is currently working with Lucy Challoner, SASW, SWU and the Campaign Collective to campaign for student bursaries in Scotland. It may be small change, but the biggest ocean comes from the smallest river.
The Importance and Relevance of Care Experienced Week
Care experienced week and care day in my opinion are of integral importance, not simply for the joy and passion and awareness of love they spread, but also for community cohesion and activist movements.
I first heard about care day in 2018 when I was volunteering at Who Cares ? Scotland and sitting on the love group of the care review. At this point in time, care experienced people as a community had been talking about an inherent lack of love in the system, or feeling loved but it had to be kept quiet because that was unprofessional.
Truly, genuine, and caring love, like what you would experience from an aunt or a mother. With the work coming from the love group and the ill ease of the community in general, something had to be done about this feeling of love in absentia, kept at arm's length and utterly refused this extremely basic human need.
It was about this time that the notion of a "Love rally" started to form, we started having discussions about a national recognition that Care experienced people Deserve to be loved! And thus, the activism element of care experienced week became so raw, this was a calculated, formulated march for one thing: to make the world know, that care experienced people were there and they were demanding love, not asking, DEMANDING.
I joined that march, amidst people that are known to me as my Care Family, people from across the country that I don't see often but I am connected to on a level akin to the little family I still bond with.
Whether through old age or just a genuinely sad reflection, I have recently realised another important reason for care experienced week and that is the element of mourning. Recently a friend passed away, a friend that helped Shap law and policy change, travelled the world to benefit care experienced people and he wasn't the only one, countless times I've been on social media and another friend is gone...not friend, family member. This is a year-round sadness, felt each time by a community of people, not a few, A community of individuals who happen to be bonded through a few shared life experiences. Care week provides a safe, caring, and Loving time of the year, filled with opportunity to see friends. And reflect/ hug/ cry and mourn.
Please do encourage any care experienced person you know, to get involved in future as on some level it will shape their world and help them grow.
Care experienced week isn't simply another week but rather a stamp on the calendar that allows care experienced people to either shy or shine, and not have to explain themselves to anyone, which they do have to do the rest of the year round.
With hope for the future,
David Grimm.