Following curiosity towards lasting change

Having time away from a busy family and professional life to meet people and organisations in my field – and to really listen, absorb, and ask questions about all they’re doing – has been a greater treat than I could ever have imagined. Countless times, I felt childlike and unburdened, with a sense of sheer joy from having the space to be curious, ask questions, and observe work that I’ve never seen in the UK before.

I work in a local authority in Sheffield with care-experienced children and young people. My life’s work to date has been in advocacy roles, with 15 years proudly coordinating collective creative advocacy voice groups for children with care experience aged 7-25.

Through this work, I had seen countless young people thrive in the voluntary advocacy group space, and yet often struggle to gain and sustain employment. In the voluntary groups, young people showed such a range of skills and potential – developing creative projects, training staff, and even opening conferences as keynote speakers – yet for many, these skills didn’t seem to translate to the ‘real world of work’, and jobs and further education proved difficult to sustain over the longer term.

In response, I’ve spent the last three years piloting a new model for care-experienced young people to be employed in voice, influence, and change roles. The aim was to create roles where young people with lived experience could work alongside colleagues with similar lived experiences, build up their hours over time, have a mentor, and work towards a qualification.

In many ways, the team was a huge success, with high-quality outputs, all five workers moving on to other roles, and core funding pledged by the council for the next cohort. However, evaluating the first version of the project left me with as many questions as it answered.

I applied for the Churchill Fellowship to give me the opportunity to pack my bags and take these questions with me on tour: How can lived-experience roles be set up in the most psychologically safe way possible? How can they support career development and progression? And how can organisations make sure the wider voices gathered through these roles lead to real systemic change?

I took six weeks to visit organisations, researchers, and incredible young people across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada who are creating paid lived-experience roles for those with care experience.

I found these questions resonated strongly with those I met and saw outstanding work in these countries that left me deeply inspired by what is possible when organisations have a clear vision and put those with lived experience at the heart of what they do. In Melbourne, Victoria, for example, the government and voluntary sector were working hand in hand with both each other and care-experienced young people in paid board positions to research, shape policy, and navigate challenges together.

Across the visits, the same openness kept appearing. Organisations, staff, and young people were embracing curiosity at every stage of their work. I saw organisations think carefully about how to acknowledge the culture of Indigenous people, ensuring this shaped and was ever-present in their work.

In Australia, all meetings I attended began with an Acknowledgement of Country and recognition that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the true owners of the land. In New Zealand, VOYCE’s advocacy conference was planned with and for 200 care-experienced children and young people, with Māori language and customs at the heart of it. In Canada, at The McCreary Centre Society, I saw specific learning programmes and ongoing employment offers ring-fenced for Indigenous young people, recognising that their needs were different from their white counterparts.

In all three countries, there was a willingness to be endlessly curious, to improve, and tweak what was being done. Hard questions were asked and difficult conversations were approached with curiosity, placing those who have traditionally been excluded from conversations and ‘done to’ at the centre of decision making, and ensuring work is ‘done with’ them.

Seeing this translate to care-experienced young people, Indigenous people, and those lower down in the hierarchy of the organisations I visited was, at times, emotional. It showed what is possible when we embrace humble curiosity and leave egos and hierarchy at the door.

Returning to Sheffield, I have a clearer sense of what safe, meaningful lived-experience employment can look like. This September, I will be sharing case studies and insights from the professionals and young people I met during my Fellowship at a seminar, creating a two-way space to reflect on learning from further afield alongside the phenomenal practice already happening in the UK.

I will also use it to gather views on what kind of practical tool could help organisations develop lived-experience team models that are psychologically safe, impactful, and genuinely supportive of young people’s long-term careers – continuing to ask questions with young people, not just about them.