Amanda Knowles MBE (Founder and Director)
Amanda Knowles MBE was just 18 years old when she became a housemother in a local authority children’s home. She has been working with care experienced children for over 40 years as a caregiver in various settings including children’s residential care, fostering, social work, and supported accommodation for care leavers. In 2017 supported by The Consortium for Therapeutic Communities and The Care Leavers Foundation, Amanda organised the first Your Life Your Story Event to amplify the voices of care experienced adults and caregivers through storytelling. Whether writing for cathartic reasons, for the record or to become published, Your Life Your Story offers a living-learning experience that unleashes the power of relationships and the untold story. Amanda has been a registered social worker for over forty years. She has worked in senior management positions in children’s social care since 1991 and has held the position of Director with Future Horizons Support Limited since 2008.
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David Jackson (Director)
David is an experienced company director and a project management professional, with over 25 years of experience, delivering multi-billion-pound projects across the nuclear, oil and gas, renewable energy, and bio-mass fields, both at home and abroad. He is a care experienced adult, having spent his first 16 years in local authority care. David attended the inaugural YLYS event in 2017, and from there went on to write his first book, based upon his childhood experience. This book has gone on to form part of social work recommended reading at a number of universities and social work departments across the country and is receiving acclaim from both care experienced people and care professionals alike.
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Saira-Jayne (Director)
Saira-Jayne is a care experienced qualified registered social worker, lived experience practitioner, artist, poet, presenter, and trainer. Saira-Jayne spent time in kinship care, foster care, and unregulated accommodation. Saira-Jayne has a varied range of experience which includes, working within the youth services and on a multitude of projects, including peer education, creative outreach with excluded young people and supporting youth exchange programmes, social care settings, advocacy services, disability services, children’s and adult’s residential care settings and independent fostering provision. Saira-Jayne has more latterly exhibited artworks in exhibitions, had poetry published, artworks used in resources for social work practice, and a director of Artifacts.
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Jackie McCartney
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Jackie has been a self-employed Ofsted registered childminder for over 20years. During her career she has provided emergency placements for looked after children, and supported families identified as needing extra support and care. She has spoken publicly about spending her life from five to sixteen in institutional care, and the challenges she has faced as a care experienced adult searching for her rightful information at Wolverhampton University, Dudley Children’s Services practice week, The National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum, Action for Children, and at the Memory, Identity, Rights, Records and Access (MIRRA) project at University College London. She is one of the original Organisers of the first Birmingham Christmas Dinner 2017, publisher of the Corporate Parent Letter to Birmingham City Council about her life after leaving care post 16, and during the Care Experienced Conference 2019 at Hope University in Liverpool she was a member of the pastoral team. Jackie attended Your Life Your Story 2019. Her poetry has been published on the internet and in the first anthology of illustrated poetry ‘The Gift of Experience, The Truth Unwrapped’ published by Your Life Your Story in 2021. Jackie is the mother of two successful children, wife and owner of Bertie, a cairn terrier.