Wexbaby and The Fostering Network have teamed up to create a bag to raise funds to support Looked-after-children.
By treating yourself to a Wexbaby Tote bag, you are supporting The Fostering Network who work tirelessly to ensure all children in the care system experience stable family life. After we proudly collaborated with the Fostering Network team last Christmas, we want to continue to support them and the +64,000 children who currently find themselves living in Foster homes.”
At the ages of seven and nine, My sister and I were taken into Foster Care after our Mother, who suffered from addiction found herself unable to care for us properly. After being passed back and forth between social services and our Mum, we were eventually raised by our Foster parents full time. We were lucky enough to be put with a couple who loved us so much that they went from being emergency short term foster carers to life long parents, ensuring that my sister and I grew up together in a stable and loving environment.
I recall when social services first came to take us away, we were given a bin bag for our belongings. I recently found out that this is common practise and that children are often given their things in carrier bags as, in the case of emergency it’s the quickest way to grab stuff together.
Having already been taken away from your family and your home, a traumatic experience irrespective of circumstances and then to add insult to injury, all you hold dear is collected in plastic bags- like rubbish. In recognition of this, and of the thousands of children like us across the country, we pledge to donate £3 from every sale of our tote bags to The Fostering Network charity.
Even though we lost the opportunity to grow up with our biological parents, we have been able to live a very “normal” life. With both of us finishing school and having Universities degrees, I now have a successful children’s brand that celebrates both our childlike imagination and our French heritage, something we would have lost forever were it not for our foster-parents determination to maintain ties with our biological grandparents in France.
Unfortunately, other children who find themselves taken into the care system are not as lucky. A huge shortage of Foster carers results in kids being constantly moved a lot and split up from their siblings. Children with such unsettled home lives are often overlooked and miss out on opportunities.
Interested in fostering? Take our foster care quiz to see if you could be part of our family!
