Please consider making a donation to support our work. All donations help our projects, our campaigns and our online and telephone support and advice to individual fellow care leavers.
Our 2026 fundraising focusses on providing support for the hundreds of care leavers who contact us each year about accessing their child care files. About half a million adults in the UK were in care as children. All of them will have had a file kept on them. These files are often our only way of finding out important facts about our childhood. This important area of our work is difficult to get funding for because its importance is mostly unrecognised by wider society. Our work in this area is conducted by care leavers who have all accessed their own care files, so we understand this issue from our personal experience. A typical care file might look like this:
If you want to get a feel for why this work matters so much to us and to our fellow care leavers then you could have a look at the audio-visual guide to accessing your care records that we have produced. This is available elsewhere on the website but you can also see it on our ‘Access to Care Records’ page, here: CLA Access to Child Care Records Audio-Visual Guide
Because the CLA is a registered charity we can claim an extra 20% back from the government for every £1 you donate. That means that if you donate £10, we actually get £12.80! Here are some of the ways your donation could help.
Here are photographs from some of our meetings with fellow care leavers over the years: 1) with the then Lord Mayor Manchester, Donna Ludford, who also grew up in care, in 2022, 2) in London with care experienced author Paolo Hewitt in 2021, 3) in Birmingham as part of our access to care records campaign launch tour, back in 2006:
