Celebrating making all the difference to kids leaving care
Action for Children’s Skills for Living service in Blackwood has celebrated the Big Lottery funded years of its operation and securing new funding for the critical service that helps young people leaving care make the difficult transition to an independent life.
Skills for Living is a psychosocial skills building intervention for young people leaving care aged between 16 and 24. The leading charity provides a therapeutic intervention based on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) to improve the emotional and social well-being of young people as they negotiate the challenging issues when leaving care.
Johanne Halford, 21, from Bedwas is a young woman who credits the service with saving her life. She said, ‘Without the project, I would probably have been dead by now. I was in that bad a place. I was struggling to get away from my abusive ex-partner and I felt like there was no way out whereas I came to Action for Children and they showed me what I could do and the things I could use to make me feel safer.
‘That helped me massively because I was in a terrible state from self-harm and overdosing that I was ready to go. But now I’ve got a will to live and even on bad days I tell myself I want to live and I want to be here. Action for Children has given me the emotional life skills to get through the bad days and I use them every day.’
Andy Dunn, practice team leader at Skills for Living in Blackwood, said: ‘We wanted to celebrate the work the young people at the project have done and the amazing progress they’ve made as the Big Lottery funding comes to an end and a new funding chapter opens with The Gwent Local Partnership Board.
‘Johanne is a great example of how seemingly desperate situations can be turned around. She has responded brilliantly to the DBT programme and her life is far more stable and happy than she could’ve imagined two years ago. It was great to see Johanne and so many other young people come and celebrate with us after all the effort they’ve put in. Skills for Living makes a huge difference to the lives of very vulnerable young people and very well worth celebrating.
