Imagine being moved through more than 100 foster homes and care homes. Seriously, just think about that.

When we recorded Terry Galloway for Gobsmacked, we weren’t looking for a West Cumbrian story.

Turns out, we got one anyway.

Terry is care experienced. There has been loss in his life, real loss, the sort that could quite reasonably have silenced somebody. It hasn’t. He’s become a formidable campaigner, determined to change things for the people coming behind him.

And then two names kept cropping up. Josh MacAlister and Emma Williamson.

Josh is our local MP and now Minister for Children and Families, driving change in children’s social care nationally.

And Emma? Well, Emma knows this stuff from the inside. She’s Deputy Leader of Cumberland Council, care experienced herself, left school at 13 having been through 12 junior schools and four secondary schools, and later went back into education. Today she’s using all of that to make sure care-experienced people are not just talked about, but heard.

So we asked Emma to introduce Terry.

Because these two know only too well that when you start life in care, you’re not necessarily starting at the same line as everybody else. You can spend years making up the distance.

And both of them have done something pretty extraordinary with that distance.

We didn’t go looking for West Cumbria in this conversation.

It found us.

So this one had to come to Assa Marra.

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