A great day out

Where else would you expect the Family Fostering Partners team to be when they want to talk to a lot of people about becoming foster carers in the shortest possible time? The Pembrokeshire Show naturally.

The Pembrokeshire County Show took place 18th to 20th August at the county showground in Haverfordwest and despite the mixed weather, the show attracted around 100,000 visitors. It was originally it was simply an agricultural show but is now much more a town and country event with a wide range of attractions for everyone, especially families.

Judith Rees, our Managing Director told journalists: “Our decision to come to the show was based around the fact that we are a new, locally based organisation and we are determined to demonstrate that we are integral part of the local community we set up to serve. As an independent foster care agency we need to recruit and train foster carers to look after vulnerable local children and the show seemed like an ideal opportunity to get our message across. This was borne out by the number of visitors to our stand and high level of interest shown”.

Judith was supported throughout the show by the rest of our team, Heledd, Bernie, Phil and Jo. They were kept busy answering questions about fostering and taking enquiries from people who had been thinking of fostering for some time. They also spent a lot of time explaining why we have elephants as a logo!

Our organisations logo features a stylised adult elephant and baby calf. This is because in the animal kingdom elephants are regarded as being the best parents, and providing the best foster parents to provide a great home environment for look after children is what we are all about. What could be more natural therefore, than to have two extremely large, custom made, stuffed elephants on the stand. These proved to be a huge attraction to visiting children, many of whom were photographed giving the elephants big hugs. No doubt those photos’s will be appearing on the family members Facebook pages and providing happy memories of their great day out.

You cannot have nameless elephants so we ran a competition to suggest the best names for our two elephant friends, the prize for the winner being two premiership match day tickets to go and see the Swans play Everton. Obviously there were a lot of Swans fans at the show as we a huge number of entries. Now we have names for our elephants, so meet Blue and Buttons pictured here with Judith.

No doubt the adventures of Blue and Buttons will feature in forthcoming blogs!

Thanks to all of you who came along to our stand to find out more about fostering local children. Naturally we hope to see some of you again in the near future when you have had time to think more about becoming a foster carer and about fostering in Wales with Family Fostering Partners. Meanwhile I am just off to feed the elephants!