Axa Hynes, right, with her foster sister Michelle Brown, also featured in the Foundling Museum photograph. Axa Hynes Lucy Sheen, whose Chinese name is Chau Lai-Tuen, aged one in the home of her adoptive parents. Lucy Sheen He said: "We were in a Children's home with other white people, so when you walk in it's a different smell, the food is different, washing powder is different, sheets smell different, your whole world changes. They want to help me and my siblings of course, but when you're torn from your family you just think these strange people have taken us away from my mum. It’s a mixture of stigma and admiration,” says Martin Figura of attitudes towards people in care. He spent his childhood moving between different carers after his mother was killed by his father in 1966. He wrote about the experience in his 2010 poetry collection Whistle, which was shortlisted for a Ted Hughes award and which Figura later turned into an Edinburgh show. He expected “a certain amount of difficulty” from the exposure but “it’s not made anything weird at all,” he says. “It’s been fine.” Greg Bramble Graeae is a world renowned innovator in theatre and its productions place creative access at their heart. This play will feature a creative use of captioning and will have audio description on offer at every performance (ask the Box Office for details).

Problems with mental health not only impact the individual suffering, but also those around them. It can be devastating to witness someone struggling, but one man had to watch his own mum suffer while also dealing with his own life changing dramatically after she was diagnosed with a condition. My own “success” happened in spite of my time in care, not because of it. I am not defined by my scars but by the incredible ability to heal. Healing can hurt too. Here are a few organisations for support and information: Become has been supporting and campaigning for children in care and young care leavers since 1985. The Care Leavers’ Association is a national user-led charity aimed at improving the lives of care leavers of all ages. The Fostering Network is the UK’s leading fostering charity; it champions fostering and seeks to create vital change. PAIN – Parents against Injustice is a voluntary organisation, run and funded by volunteers who provide help and support to families caught in the care system. Samaritans is a 24-hour service offering emotional support for anyone struggling to cope. One of the greatest signs of my own sense of independence when I left care was the day I could ask for help when I needed it. In and out of care from the age of five, Stanley J Browne says his “horror story” began aged eight, when he was separated from his siblings and fostered off to Nottingham. He rebelled against the system and later ended up in detention centres and prisons, dealing with drug addiction. His autobiography, Little Big Man (out 14 October), describes how he turned his life around to become an actor and musician. Clare Gorham

Hetty Shand

His impact on leprosy was a major one. His many official roles in leprosy committees and organisations afforded him a platform to advocate for scientific research on leprosy and for high standards of patient care. His bibliography includes over 500 scientific publications, mainly on leprosy, as well as many books and pamphlets. He died at home on World Leprosy Day, 29 January 1986, survived by his wife, Mali, and their three sons, Derek, Alastair, and Christopher. Mali Browne also died on World Leprosy Day in 2006.

A decade ago, Clare Gorham was “very much pro” transracial adoption. “I would have said that the only thing a child needs is love,” she says, reflecting on her own experience of being happily adopted by her white family in Wimbledon in 1966. “Now my mindset is slightly different. I still think love is the most important thing. But it’s a bit of a B-movie of an existence. My parents were amazing, but their colour-blind approach wasn’t representative of society’s view of me.” Sylvan Baker Natalie Hirst spent eight years living in foster care in Greater Manchester and had a mixed experience, but her resilience helped her to develop the strength and skills to overcome many challenges. “My experience has taught me the importance of having kind, supportive adults in the lives of children in care to help them feel safe, cared for and treated like one of the family,” she says. “These experiences have shaped who I am today, an independent woman, passionate about my career and working with local authorities in Greater Manchester to ensure every young person has a voice, choice and control over decisions made about them.” Michelle Brown

The issues around growing up in care don’t magically stop at 25, just because public policy stops,” says Jim Goddard, who went into care in Liverpool aged three. “They carry on, and people deal with them in various ways.” Goddard is the chair of the Care Leavers’ Association, which focuses on care leavers of all ages – it might help people access their care files, or deal with issues around social isolation. “The level of invisibility of the issues facing young people leaving care has not fundamentally altered in the past 20 years.” Akiya Henry To embrace the warrior and the humility side of ourselves that is within us all. Learning to love you for who are and not what others perception of you is or what they may want you to be. My care experience was lifesaving,” says Antiques Roadshow expert Ronnie Archer-Morgan, who recently published a memoir called Would It Surprise You to Know ?. “My home situation was dire. My mother had schizophrenia, I had a stepfather who was very violent to my mother and to me. I wanted to be in care to get out of that situation.” His experience in children’s homes and foster families between Surrey and Lancashire was “excellent. I felt incredibly cared for and looked after.” Paolo Hewitt

I must have been around 7 or 8 years old when this photo was taken. I had the world on my shoulders already at that point," Stanley reflects. "You can tell from my eyes and my facial expression that I was an unhappy camper and wore the thousand-yard-stare at such an early age. I felt switched off from the world and distant." In between my procrastination, I fed myself on a diet of autobiographies, to not only build up the courage to finish mine, but also to understand the different styles of writing a memoir and the deliverance. I educated myself by reading these memoirs and the art of writing them and still regularly read autobiographies to this day. How long did it take you to complete your first book from the first idea to release? An intelligent and sensitive child, Browne’s narrative saw him descend into crime, heroin addiction and gang life.

My own interests and experiences also weave into my stories so that readers can get an insight into my South Asian heritage, as you can see from this story about Karak Chai which I'm ever so passionate about! Stanley J. Browne is an actor, and he has been an actor all his life. Born to a Jamaican mother in a London suburb, he began rehearsing for the role of survivor from an early age. From birth he knew nothing but a home filled with love and the vibrancy of a Caribbean culture, but this changes when his mother is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sonny and Christine want to escape. They have a night to remember but underneath the surface things aren’t what they seem. Cyrus is frantically trying to piece together the truth about that night. Unexpectedly a tragedy is about to unite them all… I remember the photographer who turned up at my mothers house that day, a complete stranger to me who didn't belong in our house," Stanley recalls. "He'd been brought over to take some pictures of my mum, but suggested at the end of the shoot to do a couple of us kids standing together... I felt extra protective over my sisters then."

Browne's success at Yalisombo became internationally known, and the eminent leprologist Robert Cochrane, while visiting the Congo, encouraged Browne to leave behind his interest in general tropical medicine and focus entirely on leprosy studies. In 1963 Browne produced a "Report of a Study Tour of Leprosy Research Centres in India and the East". He mentions visiting Buluba Leprosarium (30 miles from Jinja), where there were 23,000 registered leprosy cases. This year I became a finalist for the British Muslim Awards in the Media Achiever of the Year category - and I hope to make a difference every single year with my work. I came into care when I was 13, due to being homeless,” says Sanna Mahmood. Her care experience in West Yorkshire “was reasonably positive, partly because I was just happy to have a home. Someone gave me a fish-finger sandwich and I was like, I’ve made it.” Leaving care was harder: “The social housing that I got put into was not the best – there were needles all over the floor and blood on the wall – and the support wasn’t always the greatest.” Support for care leavers has since improved, Mahmood says, thanks to new policies from her local authority in Kirklees. Jenny Bagchi Today we are living in an era where these topics are no longer taboo. It seems we are all open to having the uncomfortable conversations we once avoided and learning from each other’s life experiences.I also love supporting ethnic minority owned businesses and finding out about owners' own experiences and inspirations behind their menus, for example the story of this Chinese bakery. I was fostered till the age of one and then placed with my adoptive family,” says Annalisa Toccara. “Through my lived experience of being adopted, I co-founded a mental-health organisation called Adoptee Futures, which is led by adoptees and which centres adoptees. We look at reclaiming the adoption narrative and reframing the world’s view on adoption, and also helping adult adoptees heal from their trauma.” Louise Wallwein MBE When he was four, Kriss Akabusi’s parents returned to Nigeria, leaving him alone in the UK with his younger brother. They moved between several foster placements before entering a children’s home. Akabusi joined the British army aged 16 and later embarked on a glittering athletics career as a sprinter and hurdler. Ben Ashcroft FRSA I think of my life in two parts: before I traced my birth family and after,” says former Guardian journalist Hannah-Azieb Pool, who detailed the journey in her memoir My Fathers’ Daughter (republished this year). Pool was adopted from an Eritrean orphanage and lived in Sudan and Norway before coming to the UK aged six. Reconnecting with her birth family in Eritrea in her late 20s “allowed me to realise the multiplicities of who I am, to make connections around inter-country adoption, and the idea that you can belong in multiple places and with multiple families. It’s radically changed who I am.” Lucy Reynolds