If you would like to view Taking Hold of Our Heritage as a digital flippable book, then please follow this link to Issuu: Taking Hold of Our Heritage
Or you can download a PDF versions of the book below.
Thank you
Without the brave, creative and inspiring care experienced young people that have taken part in the Taking Hold of Our Heritage project, this book would not have been possible and you would not have heard their stories.
Thank you to Kyles, Lydia, Martin, J’vorge, Amber, Khalid, Naseer, Sulieman, Mohammed, Sophie, Diana, Lilly and the young people from Freedom.
Would you like a copy of our new, collectively authored book Taking Hold of Our Heritage?
We have a limited number of books printed, but if you would like a free copy while stocks last, please send us an email, with your name and address.
If you would like more than one copy, please let us know how they will be used, and we can probably accommodate you.
Once we have run out of books, we may organise another print run if demand is high. For this we may have to charge a small fee to cover printing and postage.
Please contact Jacob Brown for more details. jacob@leicestershirecares.co.uk
More about Taking Hold of Our Heritage
This book project gave the narrative power back to care experienced young people so they can tell the stories they want heard about their lives. Care experienced young people are often required to talk about their traumatic past to professionals, support services and sometimes their peers. Telling the same stories over and over again can start to imprint on their identity and heritage. Young people in care often move several times which can result in photographs and family keepsakes being misplaced and lost.
This project aimed to encourage care experienced young people to reflect on positive memories to change the narrative they tell about their lives, and recreate their own heritage artefacts. In this book, care experienced young people have investigated the complex nature of their identity through this project and produced an archive of artefacts including oral histories, art and photovoice.
The young people have investigated the memories and experiences of Leicestershire’s leaving care community, by looking at themselves, but also interviewing and documenting other care experienced young people’s lives.
The Taking Back Our Heritage project is funded through the Y Heritage project, Leicester, which is part of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s pioneering "Kick the Dust” funding programme.
Y Heritage
The Y has been awarded £707,500 through the Heritage Lottery Fund’s pioneering “Kick the Dust” funding programme. This will fund our project “Y Heritage”, which will be a collaboration between The Y, key civic partners such as our universities and local authorities, and the city and county’s wide and brilliant variety of heritage, cultural and creative organisations. The money will be used to better engage young people with heritage across both city and county.
Y Heritage will run a series of “Dragons Den” style pitches over three years where Leicester/Leicestershire based organisations can apply for funding up to £30,000 from a panel of young people. The young people all engage in some way with The Y. The organisations must build opportunities for work or training into their project funding application. Our aim is that our young people and the heritage projects develop and thrive together – it really is a win win opportunity!
With thanks to National Lottery Players for their support, without them projects such as Y Heritage could not happen.
Our work with care experienced young people
- Find out about the work we do with care experienced young people: mental wellbeing, employment and training, campaigning for Care Leavers rights, building social connection.
- Sign our Promise to Care
- Hear the voices of care experienced young people in our Podcasts
- Taking Hold of Our Heritage project
For more information about our work with care experienced young people, please contactJacob Brown: jacob@leicestershirecares.co.uk
