December 2024 at Fostering Together 🎄

Wow! What a busy end of year!

We've had an absolutely fantastic time celebrating an explosive year in the team where we've expanded our network, welcoming new staff, new families and supporting many new children into their long term foster families or providing enriching breaks and holidays for others in the wider fostering community. We're looking forward to working with and supporting more as we enter 2025.

So in terms of our Christmas Celebrations, we started off with our Christmas carer meet-ups for a lovely Christmas and Year-in-Review with families in Essex and then in the South East!

We then held our first Christmas party, hosted by the amazing Rare Breeds Centre in Ashford, a farm that is part of the charity Canterbury Oast Trust (COT) which supports adults who have learning disabilities and autism to gain life skills and work experience in agriculture and animal care! Every year the farm puts together a magical ✨ Christmas grotto show which the children love! (not least for the opportunity to meet Santa!)

This event also saw the reveal of our amazing trailer - the Accessible Community Support Facility (a more catchy name pending...! 😝) which we're looking forward to taking on the road more in 2025! Read more here: fosteringtogether.co.uk/news/2024/announcing-our-accessible-community-support-facility

Next, we were absolutely blown away once again by the kindness of listeners at kmfm and Hendy Group for their kindness selecting us for their 'Give-a-Gift' campaign. The team dropped by the office to donate loads of toys and presents for the disability fostering community, as part of their county-wide drop-off of presents to a variety of care-settings, including hospices, hospitals and residential facilities. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the campaign! 💜 Read more here: kmfm.co.uk/give-a-gift-2024-with-hendy/

We then held our Christmas Celebrations and Year-in-Review with our growing Midlands community, an area that we started working with at the end of 2023 - was great to see a budding community coming together! We then travelled across to Ipswich to celebrate again with the local community in this area too!

And then last, but not least was another family party at the Mini Monsters Soft Play Centre - we hired out the venue for the community and threw a Christmas bash, with our young DJ E once again in charge of the tunes! We were even graced once again with a visit from Santa Claus and his helpers!

As we've reviewed the year it's been a real privilege to look-back on all the people we've met and worked with and we look forward to supporting both our own and the wider disability-care community in 2025.

We wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and look forward to a Happy 2025! 🎆