OVERVIEW

Care for Carers is a Voluntary Organisation established in 1989 to provide support services to all carers — regardless of age, gender, disability or relationship of the person they care for.

Care for Carers has grown and developed over time: while we continue to provide essential one-to-one support and information to carers, we have become specialists in providing short breaks from caring to unpaid carers. We deliver services to carers in the Edinburgh area, but we also deliver short breaks through our Stepping Out® service to carers from across Scotland, along with many other programmes.

PARTNERSHIPS

We regularly work in partnership to deliver new programmes. One example of this is our partnership with the Royal Astronomical Society, which began in 2015 as part of their RAS200 (200 year anniversary celebration) programme and continues to this day.

Through the RAS partnership we were able to introduce carers to the world of astronomy and geophysics. This included residential breaks to the accredited International Dark Sky Areas in remote rural parts of Scotland. (In 2015 these Dark Sky Areas were the Isle of Coll and Dumfries & Galloway Forest Park.) This opened up a whole new chapter in the development of the Stepping Out® programme, enabling us to take carers further afield — to take in the experience and beauty of these remote places, and to immerse themselves in learning about the night sky and stargazing. The Creative Breaks fund has supported us continuing to provide these breaks in recent years.

The links below give a flavour of the materials we have put together to capture the experiences that carers have on breaks such as these.

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Related Documents

	Coll and the Cosmos	A photographic booklet documenting a visit by carers to the Dark Skies island of Coll.
	RAS200 Care for Carers	A short film by the Royal Astronomical Society exploring the Coll Dark Skies project.