The Importance and Impact of Participation and Network Building in Care Leaving: The Use and Significance of the Care Leaver Declaration from the International Care Leavers Convention 2020

Widely across the globe, regardless of their country or continent, young people in alternative care and child protection systems as well as care leavers do face similar problems. In 2020, various child care institutions who form the International Care Leavers’ Community organised the International Care Leavers Convention which should originally have taken place in India but was, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, moved to an online platform, which created the opportunity for care involved people across the world to participate. During the convention, following a participatory approach, over 140 care leavers from about 25 countries came together for several webinars and discussed the challenges young people with care experience face globally and how the pandemic has enforced these vulnerable situations even more, as well as given suggestions and recommendations to improve this situation. This knowledge about the situation care leavers face amid COVID-19 and beyond was identified, collected and summarised into a transnational declaration, now which constitutes 11 universal gaps: financial security, housing, education, career support and employability, psychosocial support, physical health which includes health, nutrition and hygiene; legislative and policy reforms as well as awareness and identity, participation, the social network and finally, inclusion and social protection. These gaps can be found in a certain amount in all countries around the globe, as different as their care policies may be, and could therefore be seen as universal. By identifying them, this project tried to create a kind of toolkit, which can be used by institutions as well as care leaver communities on a national as well as on international level to reclaim change in these sectors, affirming that these gaps are the same and real for thousands of young people worldwide. This article aims to synthesise the 11 gaps and develop an analysis on how participation and network building can use the declaration to help and support care leaver communities and also care leavers as individual change maker as well as caregivers to better understand the systematic and institutional problems young adults face after leaving care and when starting their independent life as well as the recommendations in response to these universally defined problems.