Amplifying the voices of young care leavers

This post by Lucy Jamieson and Wiedaad Slemming considers how an international co-production project helped to empower a group of young care leavers epistemically and politically

The voices of young care leavers are routinely discounted, ignored or excluded from conversations that directly affect their lives. Their knowledge, insights and expertise about navigating complex systems are rarely centred in policy, practice or research.  Led by Prof Mandi MacDonald (Queen’s University Belfast) and Lucy Jamieson (Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town), the Amplifying the Voices of Young Care Leavers project built an international learning community between care-experienced youth, researchers and practitioners in Northern Ireland (VOYPIC) and South Africa (Mamelani Projects). 

Through online discussions, international exchanges in Cape Town and Belfast, and participatory filmmaking, young people shared their experiences, identified priorities for leaving care research and developed advocacy messages alongside researchers and service providers to change policy and practice.

Despite living more than 10,000 kilometres apart, participants found striking similarities in their experiences. Conversations repeatedly returned to the importance of relationships, belonging, identity and being listened to. Young people spoke about the challenges of securing stable housing, employment opportunities, financial support and mental health struggles before and after leaving care. They also highlighted a less visible need: the desire to feel seen, heard and supported over time rather than only during moments of crisis.

What made this project particularly significant was its commitment to recognising young people as knowledge producers. Participatory filmmaking enabled care leavers to tell their own stories rather than having them interpreted by others. The resulting documentary, United & Unique: Separated by Geography, Connected by Community, foregrounds perspectives that are often marginalised and challenges stereotypical narratives about young people with care experience.

From an epistemic justice perspective, one of the most powerful messages to emerge was that young people are experts on their own lives. The project demonstrated that when care-experienced youth are given meaningful opportunities to participate, they generate valuable insights into what works, what does not, and what change is needed. As participants reflected, leaving care is not a single event but an ongoing process requiring sustained support and strong relationships.

The project's impact continues beyond the documentary. In South Africa, the findings are supporting advocacy for stronger policy commitments and funding for aftercare services beyond the age of 18. In Northern Ireland, the project is helping to highlight gaps between policy commitments and implementation. More broadly, it has created a platform where care-experienced young people can influence public understanding and policy conversations.

For those of us concerned with epistemic injustice, the lesson is clear: meaningful change begins when young people are not only invited to speak but are recognised as credible knowers whose lived experience is vital to shaping the systems that affect them.

The young people have produced a report to accompany the film, which you can download: McCallin_et_al_25_United_Unique_youth_report.pdf

Watch the film:

About the authors

Lucy Jamieson and Prof Wiedaad Slemming, from the Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town visited the University of Bristol to foster a partnership with the Centre for Childhoods and Social Justice.  When planning international research with children consideration of decolonisation and epistemic justice assume particular significance. Epistemic justice asks who is doing the research, with whom, about what, through what means, to what ends, in whose interests and requires reflection on power imbalances to ensure genuine and equitable partnership across cultures and generations.  International partnerships between the Global North and the Global South are especially challenging due to inequities in resources to produce knowledge, recognition of expertise, and the platforms to have that knowledge heard. Lucy presented on participatory methods used in two international research projects including the co-production of the documentary United and Unique.