Affinity Fostering turns three!

We recently celebrated our third birthday and we wanted to share some of our key milestones with you over the past three years.

As a company, we’ve expanded across Kent, Essex and into London and in our first Ofsted inspection, we were rated as an “Outstanding” agency, a recognition that has given us an opportunity to work with 24 Local Authorities. We’ve also grown in a big way: from a team of three to a strong staff team of 14 and nearly 50 amazing Foster Carers.

At Affinity, we’re big believers in training and developing both our Carers and our core staff. In three years alone, we’ve completed more than 250 individual training courses. We also believe in bringing our family of Carers from across Kent, London and Essex together as often as possible and, since we started, we’ve held an annual two-day conference to help build an even stronger community of Carers here at Affinity. However, bringing our family together doesn’t just stop at our Carers, it’s important for our young people to feel a part of the Affinity community too. That’s why we hold regular activity days and annual residential holidays for our young people to get together, and meet people going through the same experiences as themselves.

We’re also all about giving back to our local community and that’s why we’ve developed strong links with local charities covering a whole range of different areas. From the Teddington Trust, who work to improve the lives of patients and families affected by the rare and incurable condition, Xeroderma Pigmentosum, through to Freedom for Wheels, a charity that helps disabled individuals in Kent receive the support and equipment needed in order to help regain quality of life. To support these charities, we’ve run several fundraising events and over the last few months alone, we’ve raised more than £750 for our chosen charity.

Our journey over the last few years has also included a recent office move. The growth we’ve seen in the agency over the last three years called for it and the exciting thing is, we’re still growing! We’ve got some very exciting times ahead here at Affinity.

Moving home, activity holidays, staff and carer training and development all play into our core belief of a child-centered, high quality practice and it’s something that will never change, however big we become!