We worked with a group of young people in care who attend a project run by the Roots Foundation Wales and the South West Wales Reaching Wider Partnership – Swansea University, to create a film with care-experienced young people. The film represents the key messages that young people wanted to share with social workers.

The group meets regularly and offers care-experienced young people the opportunity to get together for social events, educational opportunities, and a range of activities. In January and February 2019, we worked together to make our first collaborative film: #FromYoungPeopleForYoungPeople – Find Your Tribe.

In the summer of 2019, we met up again to think about what other messages were important and who should hear them. We started to brainstorm ideas and decided on the main messages, and then we got to work on scripting and creating visual elements for the film. We used story boards to put together the group’s ideas and experimented with drawing, stickers, and fuzzy felts.

The original images made by the group were used as the basis for the film animation, bringing to life the messages based on their own experiences that the young people wanted to share with the help of Like an Egg Productions. The film represents their ideas about how they would like to work with social workers in the future. These are their #messagestosocialworkers.

Dawn Mannay, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University @dawnmannay

Rachael Vaughan, CASCADE: Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre, Cardiff University @VaughanRach

Helen Davies, South West Wales Reaching Wider Partnership – Swansea University @ReachingWiderSU

Emma Jones, Roots Foundation Wales @RootsWales