From Longing to Belonging: Relational Activism Love in Motion 14.2.25 Discussion Circle: Sustaining Lifelong Relationships

Only by multiplying our circles of care – in the first instance, by expanding our notion of kinship – will we achieve the psychic infrastructures necessary to build a caring society that has universal care as its ideal (The Care Manifesto, The Care Collective). 

I wrote some notes to help shape my thinking / sharing following my invitation to join the Relational Activism Love in Motion 14.2.25 discussion circle: Sustaining Lifelong Relationships. I developed those notes into this piece of writing.

As a prologue, I want to shout-out new(ish) podcast But We All Shine On with elder care leavers Paolo Hewitt and Paul Anderson-Walsh, who bring authenticity and insight to deeply personal conversations with care experienced people who went on to thrive. As I listened to the second episode with Jim Goddard, chair of the Care Leavers Association when asked at the end of the pod what advice he’d give to his younger self and his response “Try Not To Be So Scared” coursed through my body in a deep recognition and tingling that resonated with an embodied conflict that I have named From Longing to Belonging. 

Journey back to 2018, through the interconnectivity of social media I began to connect with fellow care experienced adults for the first time. I was drawn to a calling circulating to get involved with a national Care Experienced Conference to be held 2019 to enable a much-needed debate about the care system past and present. During our early meetings, a familiar under-the-skin pulsing, a creep of cortisol anxiety that lingered from childhood flooded my body.  Do they like me, am I good enough, everyone else seems sorted, breathe, breathe…stay in the room.  Gentle elders (you know who you are 🫶🏻), who had a sixth sense shared tea, their stories and journeys with me, inviting me to a knowing felt sense of kinship I hadn’t experienced before. The conference brought together over 100 care-experienced people of all ages, and some of us forged intergenerational kinship and mutual healing in both sharing our stories and recognising the creativity of our resilience.  Relationships that continue through everyday warmth, love and support and unique collaborations and projects. 

2020, Love Shows Up: Relationships Making a Difference, a Valentine's Day event hosted by Camden Council. My body tingled with the invitation to love is to act. Navigating the beautiful stories, sharings, systemic graplings and relationships, the familiar under-the-skin pulsing coursed through me, though gentler. Rather than anxiety, I began to understand the feelings as trauma release in being in a space where vulnerability, belonging and love were welcome co-created  amongst all those who both have to navigate and work within the care system - care experienced, parent advocates, professionals and researchers. As an embodied introduction to relational activism, it was the beginning of a recognition that the anxiety I experienced since childhood was a deep longing calling out for belonging and healing. 

Back in February Jim Godard, the chair of the Care Leavers Association, my friend and Care Experienced Conference colleague Rosie Canning and I held space with a group of care-experienced adults to share and commemorate experiences of loss. We shared a familiar tingling of hesitation and concern felt and voiced between us. What might open up, were we enough to create safety, was there a holding available after for community members?  As each participant's story unfolded our shared vulnerability and resonance became a kind of glue-like connection and those who listened, felt into their longing to also share their experience of loss and feel belonging.  As a side note, for the gathering I drew on the work of Francis Weller, a psychotherapist and author, who offers valuable insights about loss in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow and his invitation to explore The Five Gates of Grief and Loss, which offers a practical process of engaging with loss and grief experienced by those navigating the care system and trauma.

Back in 2022, Relational Activist Tim Fisher reached out to me for a chat after reading the chapter I had written in Lisa Cherry’s book (thank you, Lisa!) The Brightness of Stars: Stories from Care Experienced Adults to Inspire Change.  Drawing from and orientating Relational Activism relationalactivism.com toward care experienced adults I wrote in the chapter:

The elephant in the room is the legacy of systemic discrimination, shame and stigma that has historically prevented our process of coming together as a community to understand and heal our collective trauma (Hübl 2020) as other groups.  Healing the legacy of our care experience lies in relocating agency in the collective and recognising relationships as the locus for change (Relational Activism 2021).

My chat with Tim was a great amble where I shared, as I had with Lisa on her pod reflecting on my chapter, an aspect of the writing I would have liked to develop was to bring a queer lens to care experience, the care system, and family to imagine and foster other possibilities for kinship for care experienced people. This was inspired by my continuing experiences of intergenerational connections with care experienced people and an embodied recognition of a need we share to move from longing to belonging. 

When we met to discuss me joining the Sustaining Lifelong Relationships discussion circle Tim reminded me how during our previous discussion we spoke about queer feminist writer Donna Harraway’s Experimental Futures series book which inspired my thinking and reflections during the discussion. 

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Harraway invites us to reimagine and:

“make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” where “staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other.”

I love Harraway’s invitation to make oddkin, which resonates with my experience of making kin with other care experienced adults. Not kin in the normative sense of family, but our sense of belonging and care for each other can be deeply connective, and enduring, where spaces are created where we can shift the emotional imprint from being in our longing to a lived experience of belonging. What might an untapped intergenerational kinship between care experienced people of all ages, parent advocates, and all who navigate and work within the care system offer if we were to create this as a possibility?  As the Care Collective shares in The Care Manifesto it would mean:

“caring more and in ways that remain experimental and extensive by current standards. We have relied upon ‘the market’ and ‘the family’ to provide too many of our caring needs for too long. We need to create a more capacious notion of care.” 

How might we lean into and create more capacious forms of care?

Care leavers and care experienced adults are called on to share their experiences at conferences, join skills to foster and adopt and social work trainings, mentoring and research - all good and necessary, but mostly individual, occasional and generally transactional rather than co-produced.  What if we imagined beyond and celebrate and support the intergenerational care experienced community to connect and become a capacious oddkin of carers, aunties, elders, niblings and ancestors to support children, young people, parents and each other through lifelong sustaining relationships?

I’m 44 years old and began connecting with my care experienced oddkin only 7 years ago, and those relationships will be lifelong. What a difference it could have made 20 or 30 years ago? Would anxious longing have overwhelmed me throughout my childhood and early adulthood if I had experienced belonging to an intergenerational and ancestral oddkin community of care?

What might be possible if in our work supporting individuals, relationships and families, we always take a breath and orient towards the possibility that under the surface is a deep longing, a longing that needs to move toward a genuine embodied experience and sense of belonging?

To wrap up, I want to shout out the Care Leavers Association, a national user-led charity aimed at improving the lives of care leavers of all ages who bring together the voices and experiences of care leavers to support care leavers of all ages, improve the current care system and change society’s perception.

I've had the privilege of gathering each month with the amazing 

Care Leavers Connected team to explore and reflect and they inspire me in their passion - the learning and growth is relational and mutual. 

The NEW community platform they've just launched is made by care leavers for care leavers, supporting connections between care leavers to reconnect past relationships through adding homes or placements or by sharing interests for new intergenerational connections. 

It offers a way of connecting with others to share and reflect on experiences and receive mutual support from each other. 

This is just one reason I'm running the #Brighton10K for the CLA to ensure this important resource will support #CareLeavers beyond the #CareCliff for years to come.

📰 Learn more via the brilliant CareLeaversConnected Zine

💸 Support my run and the project: bit.ly/clabrighton10k

Whether it’s cheering me on, making a donation, or simply sharing this post or their great work  – we appreciate every bit of support 🫶