Get Involved - Young Peoples Articles, Consultations & Traineeships

EPIC puts young people at the core of everything we do and gives them the opportunity to understand our work and become involved at different levels of the organisation. Becoming involved with EPIC gives young people effective ways of infl uencing our work and sharing their experience’s with other young people, professionals, carer’s and students in the care field.

EPIC Traineeships

EPIC traineeship programme offers young people with care experience opportunities to work with the organisation. If you are 18 years of age or older contact EPIC for information about future traineeships.

(Read more: Article by Keith Tunnah - EPIC Trainee)

EPIC Website

EPIC invite young people with care experience to get involved in developing our website. Let us know what information you would like to see on the website and help us develop ideas for blogs and pod casts.

EPIC Newsletter

EPIC invite young people with care experience to help in the production of our newsletters by writing articles, suggesting topics and helping with the design. Give us your views on what kind of information you think we should include.

EPIC Consultations

EPIC regularly consult with young people on different issues about their care and aftercare. Let us know if you would be interested in participating in our consultation groups.

Young Peoples Articles:

Article by EPIC Trainee - Keith Tunnah

" My name is Keith Tunnah and I worked with EPIC when it was called IAYPIC. I was one of two trainees employed by EPIC in September of 2010 along with 12 sessional workers who were employed also.

The traineeship lasted six months and during our time in IAYPIC’s we had so many opportunities and experiences we will never forget. During the traineeship we took part in the Raynor Life Long Learning Project which helped us with many things such as self esteem, emotional intelligence and for me personally making some life long friends not just colleagues.

A very important part to the training was where we took part in a piece looking at perceptions of young people in care. Firstly we looked at what we thought the general public thought about young people in care and then we looked at how a young person in care saw themselves. We created posters which depicted a typical 16year old young person in care and added statement either side of the young person drawn in the poster. From looking back at the posters we felt that the overview was primarily negative.

After that activity and having attended a training weekend on Youth in Action projects a few of us formed a group called Care Leavers Independent Committee with the help of our trainer Brenda. We have now set up a project to create a positive poster campaign for young people in care.

While working within the EPIC I had the opportunity to take part in many different pieces of work, such as consultations, presentations, making documents child friendly to name but a few .

My time in EPIC was filled with experience building events like the Irish foster Care Association Annual Conference, and the Raynor L-IFE project partners meeting in Romania where myself and the other trainee got the opportunity to go to Romania and meet other young people from various places in Europe. "