You Can Foster is a region-wide recruitment campaign that aims to shift perceptions of foster carers and recruit new carers within particular areas of need. The campaign has recently been extended to cover Yorkshire. As part of this, our PR and Content Team has been working with poet Tony Walsh and children’s authors Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Cathy Cassidy, Dan Worsley and Livi Michael on a writing competition that encourages young people in foster care across the North of England to tell their own stories.

It was an honour to be approached to be part of the ‘This is the Place’ book, a creative memorial in response to the attack on Manchester Arena in May 2017. The book, based around Tony Walsh’s poem 'This is the Place’, brought the creative community of Manchester together to reflect on the tragedy. We were given one line of the poem and the challenge of creating one page of the book.