An inspirational new creative writing competition has been launched in Sefton as part of the regional You Can Foster campaign.

The aim of the competition is to encourage children and young people in foster care and fostering families to tell their stories and encourage a new generation of adults to sign up as foster carers.

And the entries, across five age categories, will be judged by an auspicious panel of children’s authors and poets including children’s author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, poet Tony Walsh, children’s authors Cathy Cassidy, Livi Michael and Dan Worsley.

The Inspiring Stories competition, aims to explore the ambitions of the thousands of children and young people who are in foster care across Sefton and the Liverpool City Region.

It is hoped that the stories will reveal the real sense of value and motivation that foster carers have along with the profound way in which they can help to shape young lives for the better.

Liverpool-born children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce said:

“Stories are how we make sense of our lives. The only way we can hope to understand another person is by listening to their story. The only way we can hope to understand ourselves is by finding someone who will listen to our story. When we hear other people’s stories we discover we are not alone in our troubles. And we learn that there are solutions to our problems.

“As G K Chesterton said – we don’t read fairy stories to learn that dragons are real. We read them to learn that dragons can be defeated.”

Stories submitted can be a personal account of a fostering experience or an inspirational tale that needs to be told. Entries can be fiction, non-fiction, written or even drawn so that all ages can engage with the competition.

Children and young people can visit youcanfoster.org/competition to find out more and submit their stories which should be no longer than 800 words. The deadline for entries is 5pm on Friday November 17, 2017.

The ‘You Can Foster’ campaign brings together a number of local authorities to highlight the need for foster carers in Sefton and across the North of England and includes a number of TV adverts and social media promotion. Local Authorities particularly need to recruit foster carers for certain groups of children including:

Brothers and sisters
Older children and young people
Children from black and ethnic minority backgrounds
Children that will be in foster care long term
Children who need more specialist care
For more information please visit http://youcanfoster.org/