Foster Care Matters, a new fostering agency, is officially launched with the help of Chester's Town Crier, David Mitchell, who announced the opening of the agency on Saturday 11 May.
The team also hosted an information stand at Chester’s multi-award-winning venue, Storyhouse.
Foster Care Matters, who achieved their Ofsted registration this month, will offer stable and loving homes for children and young people aged 0 to 18 years and will be recruiting foster parents across the North West.
As a children’s charity with children’s needs at their heart, Foster Care Matters is committed to re-investing back into their services to offer high quality support and ongoing training to their foster families, enabling them to help children matter.
The agency, whose head office is in Chester, offers a therapeutic approach and dedicated support to foster parents including access to their Centre for Fostering and Adoption Support, an established and recognised centre in the North West, offering innovative, bespoke, ongoing support from a multi-disciplinary team including occupational therapists and trained therapeutic social workers.
Karen Palfreyman, Foster Care Matters Registered Manager commented:
“We are delighted to launch our new agency just ahead of Foster Care Fortnight 2024, which is such an important event for raising awareness of the many aspects of fostering.
Nearly 70,000 children live with almost 55,000 foster families across the UK each day. This is nearly three-quarters of the over 98,000 children in care away from home on any one day in the UK. Every year thousands of new foster families are needed.
In the North West, there is a huge need for foster parents who can care for children of all ages, cultures and backgrounds.
"Foster Care Matters therapeutic approach runs through everything we do and we cannot wait to start building our fostering family by recruiting foster parents across the North West."
Foster Care Matters is part of the Adoption Matters family, a children’s charity and well-established voluntary adoption agency with over 76 years of experience in the children’s sector and the ONLY adoption agency in the North rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted five times in a row.
To find out more and download a fostering information pack, visit: www.fostercarematters.org.uk