Care Industry for Once Receives a Good Rap

You don’t need to know James’ background, he was a kid in a muddle with a few misdemeanour’s under his belt who had found himself in the care of Anderida Adolescent Care, a specialist care setting for young people with a history of failed placements. But while James’ upbringing had been difficult and while he suffered knock backs often through no fault of his own, he had passion and enthusiasm by the bucket load. I was one of his carers and youth workers for a couple of years and while I may be writing a piece in part from the perspective of someone marketing an organisation, most of me simply wants to pay tribute to a lad who worked hard whilst faced with some all too familiar hurdles along the way.

The social care industry has doubtless taken a battering over recent times through mistakes and negligence by just a tiny sample of individuals within the line of work and when sharks smell blood they move pretty quickly. Moral panic is high on a lot of media’s agenda and when it gets its teeth into something, the black and white press can turn any difficult to manage situation into a story of failure and thoughtlessness on the part of those responsible. James however may be one of those stories that stand up to the relentless storm as it rains down soaking the industry and those voiceless individuals as they work day and night to help those that need a support network in order to survive.

Throughout James Julian’s time in care he was hard on himself about what kind of a person he was – he was, in my opinion, his own biggest critic, but while this is often seen as a fault it may be the reason that he pushed himself harder and further in all that he did. He threw himself into basketball. He played it, loved it and it wasn’t long before he found himself playing for the local side and then the Brighton U18’s team. He went back to school and grafted for his GCSE’s and was offered a place at college despite coming out of school at an early age. He started expressing himself through rapping; and when I say “expressing himself,” we’re not talking the kind of rap that you might hear about nothing in particular from a wannabe one man crime spree, but what he found to be the root causes of his problems, reminding himself in his words of what he can achieve and what he could become. But, it was his cooking that James found the source of his biggest passion.