Listening is often treated as a courtesy: polite, passive, and easy to claim. But real listening is active. It requires sharing power, sitting with discomfort, and acting on what you hear. At Voices from Care Cymru, listening is not a slogan. It is how we work.
For decades, care-experienced children and young people in Wales have been spoken about, designed for, and planned around. Policies have been written without them in the room. Services have been shaped by assumptions rather than lived reality. Too often, this has produced systems that manage risk but fall short on stability, dignity, and belonging.
Our organisation exists because listening was missing, and because children and young people demanded something different.
Listening, for us, does not begin with a survey or a one-off consultation. It begins with trust: spaces where children and young people are believed, not tested, and where lived experience is treated as expertise. It also means recognising that those who live inside the care system understand it in ways no framework or inspection ever can.
When listening is genuine, it changes the questions being asked. Instead of “How do we improve outcomes?”, the question becomes “What does a good life look like to the people livingit?” That shift turns participation into partnership.
Over time, children and young people with care experience in Wales have repeated the same truths. Instability causes harm. Decisions are too often made far away from the people most affected. And when profit exists within children’s care, it distorts priorities. These are not abstract critiques. They are rooted in real experiences of frequent moves, disrupted relationships, and support shaped around processes rather than people.
Listening meant taking those concerns seriously, even when they challenged long-established norms.
That approach shows up across our work. Through national and regional participation groups, children and young people shape agendas rather than simply respond to them. Through summits and direct dialogue with decision-makers, they set priorities and scrutinise progress. Through programmes focused on wellbeing, transition, and corporate parenting, they define what good support looks like in practice, and where systems fall short.
In 2026, Wales introduced legislation to end profit in children’s care. This moment did not arrive suddenly, nor was it inevitable. It was shaped by years of representing children and young people whose voices challenged the idea that children’s lives should generate shareholder returns. The legislation is a structural shift, but it also signals what becomes possible when lived experience shapes policy.
For Voices from Care Cymru, this is what we are here for. We do not speak on behalf of children and young people. We create the conditions and platforms that enable them to be heard directly, credibly, and consistently.
What makes this commitment distinctive is that it is built into our governance. Care-experienced trustees hold the majority vote on our Board, meaning lived experience is not advisory but decisive. Children and young people are not consulted at the edges of power. They hold it.
Our work is also explicitly rights-based. Voices from Care Cymru exists to uphold and promote the rights of children and young people as set out in the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child. Listening is not only good practice; it is a rights obligation. Children and young people have the right to be heard in decisions that affect their lives, and to have their views taken seriously. This is the kind of style that matters in a city and a nation: how organisations show up, how power is shared, and how consistently children and young people are included in decisions that shape their lives.
At its core, Voices from Care Cymru is about shifting culture: from listening as politeness to listening as responsibility. Because when institutions listen properly, they do not just hear stories. They change structures.
To find out more about Voices from Care Cymru, and how to support them, visit their website, vfcc.org.uk
