Foster care in East Midlands: Discover how becoming a foster carer can make a difference for teens in need

Team Fostering - an independent, not-for-profit fostering agency – is a “small but mighty” agency which has been providing safe, high quality, family-based care to young people for over 20 years.

Now it is encouraging people in the East Midlands to step forward in 2024 and consider being a foster carer.

They’re looking for people who can make a difference to the lives of others, such as the teenager known as J.

A renewed drive to consider fostering

The teenage girl has found a new lease of life thanks to the support and encouragement of foster carer Andrea, who welcomed J into her home through Team Fostering.

It was a life changing experience for both of them.

Single mum Andrea - whose daughter is grown up - joined Team Fostering thinking that she wanted to be able to make a difference to people who needed help.

But Andrea had worried if she’d be able to manage fostering on her own.

Then circumstances led her to offer a place of safety to a 19-year-old woman who had escaped the fighting in Ukraine.

The experience was positive; and Andrea felt a renewed drive to consider fostering.

Andrea felt at first she was looking to foster younger children, because stories she’d heard about teenagers in foster care had made her unsure if she’d be able to support them.

But that had now changed, and Andrea challenged herself to foster a teenager; she was matched with J.

Encourage them to make the right choices

The decision turned J’s future around. Before she was fostered by Andrea, J didn’t have any routines in place, and her attendance at school was poor.

Andrea described J as a “typical teenager, sometimes stroppy” but Andrea persevered. She explains that with teenagers “your goal is to be diplomatic” and to “treat them like an adult but be smart about it and encourage them to make the right choices”.

Those right choices included a new attitude to school. With Andrea’s encouragement, J realised that she had to work her “socks off” to achieve the grades she needed to pursue a career in working with children.

It paid off, with J even telling Andrea “if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have done this”.

Andrea has also supported J to discover other life opportunities that she had never had the chance to experience, such as holidays, or even visiting a farm and seeing a sheep in real life.

How to find out more about Team Fostering

In her new career as a foster carer, Andrea has received the support she needed from Team Fostering.

She says that support has been “outstanding” and when she’s needed advice she always got “a response straight away”.

If you’re inspired by Andrea and J’s story, and want to find out more about fostering and helping young people, then a first step could be to attend one of Team Fostering’s recruitment events in January.

There are in-person drop-in sessions at the Team Fostering offices, opportunities to meet the team in the community, or options to join an online information event.

To find out more, go to the Team Fostering website