Westminster and beyond!

This blog is designed to bring members, signatories to the ECLCM petition and any other interested parties up to speed about developments in the campaign without being restricted to 140 characters!

Many of those who we hope will read this will, by now be aware that we have the opportunity to hold a relatively ‘public meeting’ in The Wilson Room at Westminster on 11th September.

Whilst we have – as far as is possible on Twitter and other social media - thanked Craig Whittaker M.P. for his generosity in making this possible this blog presents us with the opportunity to do so more formally. Mr Whittaker has followed and (in an apolitical  sense) supported the campaign for some considerable period now and all of those associated with our cause want to place on record our gratitude to him.

The opportunity to hold this meeting is a very welcome one and within the limitations within which we work we want to use the opportunity to the best advantage of care leavers and their needs particularly in relation to ‘staying put’.

We can invite up to 50 people on the day and we’re working on how to best sort this out as happily demand is high. Please bear with us – the lack of anything but our own spare time to organise really does hold us back sometimes but we are doing the best we can to make this an inclusive event.

Our thinking is that we would like as many of our immediate cluster of campaigners to be there as possible. We have also received massive support from some individuals and organisations over the last eight months who would like to attend and we want to accommodate as many of them as possible, partly because of what they have and can continue to do to promote the campaign to a wider audience. We are absolutely committed to having some care leavers or ‘near care leavers’ there. After all they or those they represent are what this campaign is all about. We would also like to include some ‘ordinary’ members -those people who are no less important than ‘high profile’ or well known organisations but who are the ‘grass roots’ of this campaign.

If you have been doing mental arithmetic over course of reading this paragraph then you will understand our challenge. We have given ourselves until early next week to determine how many of ‘our group’ can get there and at the same time we are allocating ‘invites’ to an agreed list of those representing organisations (many of whom are Members of the Campaign, too). There is a problem in inviting care leavers as we have no funds and we can’t expect that young people to be able to fund themselves but we will find a way. Having identified how these various groups can be accommodated we will then know how many ‘ordinary’ members we can invite and the fairest way will be to do this on a first come first served basis – we will publish details on social media hopefully by the end of next week of how  we will organise this.

We will also produce another blog – and provide links on Twitter and Facebook – nearer the date of the meeting in which we will publish the proposed Agenda for the meeting and details of how those coming can physically gain access to it. Please pass this information onto anyone you feel may be interested – the wider our network the sooner we will succeed in this campaign for justice for residential care leavers.

Thank you