Fife Young Carers provides region wide support to young people who have a significant unpaid caring role. It is a local charity committed to improving the support and information provided to young carers in Fife.
Young carers have been catered for by small local groups in Fife since 1995 before finally amalgamating to become Fife Young Carers in 1998. Since then, the service has expanded significantly and now employs a CEO, four managers and 25 members of staff, along with a bank of sessional workers. The delivery of its service is also supported by volunteers.
In 2017 Fife Young Carers became a Scottish Charity Incorporated Organisation (SCIO), with all assets being transferred to it, from Fife Young Carers.
Fife Young Carers believes all young people and young adult carers should be recognised, supported and be given a voice.
Harvey Carruthers, CEO at Fife Young Carers, shares his experience of Brain Trust, a programme we run in partnership with Barclays.
What motivated you to apply Brain Trust?
One of our Trustees had previously worked with Pilotlight when employed in another organisation and made the recommendation.
How did the programme go?
The session with the Barclays Pilotligthers went well. The programme enabled my colleague and I to share our ideas around the challenge of engagement with young adult carers.
My colleague and I had rehearsed informally how we would summarise the challenge we presented to the Barclays Pilotlighters, and so we felt well prepared to present our case without the need for supporting materials. Of course, once we got into conversation with Pilotlighters their enthusiasm fed ours and the conversation felt lively, safe and hugely supportive!
Our Pilotlight Project Manager was a superb guide from our initial introduction through to the implementation on the day. It could quite easily have been confusing, especially as the exercise itself was intense and the schedule tight. The Pilotlighters came across as engaged, thoughtful and most notably came up almost entirely with solutions that were not just extrapolations of what we are currently doing but provided us with new lines of thought.
We found the Pilotlighters grasped the key constraints we faced, and quickly summarised the issue, and offered fresh solutions.
It will take time for us to act on all of the ideas generated!
Results since the programme
As soon as we completed Brain Trust, we became subsumed by the dual funding challenges of national insurance changes, and a local funding crisis. This has slowed implementation. However, we have a programme drafted to execute some of the suggestions made by the Barclays Pilotlighters, particularly regarding digital and face-to-face engagement with our school-leaver young carers. We have also restructured two of our staff roles and are designing a new approach to young adult carers with partner organisations.