Tag Archives: activities

Breaks, Young Carers

Young Carers Get Creative

Animation 1

Story by Rosie Hurley 

A couple of weeks ago a group of our young carers had the chance to get creative with professional animators.

The project was run by the national arts charity Create, whose programme art:space allows young carers to step away from responsibilities and have fun learning new skills. Working alongside SouthGate shopping centre in Bath, and funded by British Land, art:space helped our young carers to produce their own short animated film from 27-29 July.

The film, called ‘Ninja’, looked like great fun to make, and definitely shows off the skills the young carers learnt. It experiments with different animation techniques, and involved drawing charcoal images and then photographing them, before rubbing them out and redrawing them again for the stop-motion animation effect. To animate the abstract shapes and patterns they used computer software which resulted in an impressive multi-form film. The film is available to watch on YouTube. Continue reading Young Carers Get Creative →

Carer Stories, Carers in the media, Young Carers

National Young Carers Awareness Day – 28th Jan

Joe in our Carers Centre garden
Joe in our Carers Centre garden

Tomorrow is National Young Carers Awareness Day, a national event aiming to inform the UK of who young carers are and the hidden struggles they face every day. Therefore today, we want to highlight one of our brilliant young carers, who we named our Young Carer of the Year 2015.

Seventeen-year-old Joe Lomax is the main carer for his mum, who suffers with chronic back pain. Joe manages to provide this care while attending college and looking for part time work. This isn’t all: he is becoming increasingly involved in our Young Carers service, acting as a fantastic role model for other young people. Joe’s friendliness, warmth and compassion means he always welcomes new Young Carers with a smile.

During the Young Carers ‘Big Day Out’ trip in August, Joe provided hands on help for the YC team, assisting the youngest boys to build rafts and row boats, while also organising the children effectively. At our bike workshop later that summer, Joe spoke to various trustees about the work he was doing to the bikes, providing an informative and funny description of the day’s events. They were really impressed, which helped their decision to fund more Young Carers activities in the New Year.

Joe is one of our most popular Young Carers and a true example of how amazing these young people are. It was an honour to award him our Young Carer of the Year 2015 and we can’t wait to see him again this year!

Young Carers Awareness Day is on Thursday 28th January – please get involved or donate to support Young Carers like Joe. You can find more information from The Carers Trust here: https://www.carers.org/young-carers-awareness-day