Refugia, Vulnerability and the Conditions for Flourishing for Care-Experienced Young People

With a particular focus on care-experienced young people, I want to encourage us to think about the intersection between the individual and the environment when it comes to belonging. So that I can do this, I want to introduce refugia, a concept drawn from ecological biogeography. It’s easy to talk about belonging, but there are many layers to cultivating belonging, for others and for ourselves. I thought you might like a different way to think about this… but you’ll need to go and grab a cuppa as this is not a short article (although I have reduced the length as much as possible). You’ll also need time to process it.

In ecology, refugia are bounded environments in which life survives hostile conditions and from which flourishing can spread outward; the concept has acquired renewed relevance in resilience theory and through the work of scholars such as Anna Tsing (2015), has begun to migrate into social and cultural analysis.

I will argue that when practitioners and systems create the structural conditions for belonging, they are constructing relational refugia; protected, generative spaces in which the developmental processes foreclosed by relational deprivation may resume. However, what will become important to understand is that the existence of a refugium is necessary but insufficient. Access requires the enactment of vulnerability by the person. Drawing on vulnerability theory (Fineman, 2008; Brown, 2012), attachment theory (Bowlby, 1988), and anthropological accounts of liminality (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960), I will open up the space to see vulnerability as the threshold act through which care-experienced young people have to cross from the hostile landscape of relational deprivation into the conditions where belonging can take root.

Introduction

In the natural world, not all environments are hospitable to life. Glacial advance, drought and habitat destruction create landscapes in which survival is contingent on finding shelter; bounded places where the conditions for life persist even as the surrounding terrain becomes lethal. The biological concept of refugia (singular: refugium) names these spaces as generative. From refugia, species do not simply survive; they eventually recolonise, spreading outward as conditions allow (Hewitt, 2000; Keppel et al., 2012).

The landscape navigated by young people leaving care bears more than metaphorical resemblance to this hostile terrain. The care system, despite the commitment of many who work within it, frequently produces conditions of relational instability, constant movement and social disconnection that shut down the developmental processes through which belonging is ordinarily accessed and achieved. By the time a care-experienced young person reaches adulthood, they may have experienced multiple moves, the severance of family relationships and the repeated loss of trusted adults; a cumulative relational deprivation that operates as a kind of structural glaciation, a slow and systemic freezing of the conditions in which belonging could otherwise take root.

My suggestion is that when practitioners and systems create the structural conditions for belonging, they are constructing relational refugia; bounded, protective and generative environments in which the developmental possibilities foreclosed by prior relational harm may begin, tentatively, to resume. I develop this argument more thoroughly in my new book on my Belonging-Mattering-Liminality (BML) framework (out in 2027). BUT for care-experienced young people whose relational histories are characterised by harm, betrayal and loss, crossing the threshold into a space of potential belonging is not a passive or automatic act. It requires vulnerability, the willingness to risk connection in a landscape that has repeatedly demonstrated the costs of trusting.

The Concept of Refugia

The term refugia entered scientific discourse through Quaternary biogeography which is the study of how species distributions shifted during periods of radical climate change, particularly the glacial cycles of the Pleistocene epoch. As ice sheets advanced across Europe, Asia and the Americas, many species were pushed southward or retreated to isolated pockets of hospitable microclimate where the conditions for survival persisted. These were refugia; bounded zones of protection within a hostile landscape (Hewitt, 2000).

What made refugia theoretically significant, beyond their role in species survival, was their generative function. Life did not begin again from nothing; it spread outward from the places where it had, against the odds, continued (Keppel et al., 2012). Refugia were bounded zones of persistence from which flourishing could be seeded into a recovering landscape. Note the word flourishing… something we all want for our children and young people.

Anna Tsing's (2015) landmark work The Mushroom at the End of the World offers the most sustained existing migration of refugia into social and cultural theory. Tsing uses the concept to analyse "patchy landscapes," uneven terrains of survival and possibility produced by the disruptions of capitalism and identifies refugia as the spaces where alternative modes of living and relating persist despite hostile conditions. This struck me as highly relevant for thinking about care experienced young people and the adults they become. Importantly for me, Tsing emphasises that refugia are not pre-given; they are produced through the intersection of particular conditions and particular choices made to inhabit and sustain them. Relational refugia do not simply exist; they are made, through deliberate practice, through policy and through the commitment of specific adults to create and hold spaces in which belonging can begin.

Refugial Rootedness in my BML Framework

Belonging is not simply inclusion or co-presence; it is the experience of being rooted in a relational landscape that will not dissolve. For care-experienced young people, whose relational histories are characterised by the repeated dissolution of attachment relationships, by constant movement between PLACES SPACES and FACES (Cherry, 2025) that ended without warning, by systems that moved them across boundaries without adequate preparation, the absence of belonging is not a peripheral deficit but a foundational wound. Read that again… A FOUNDATIONAL WOUND.

Using the idea of refugia, this form of belonging corresponds to the ecological concept of habitat suitability; the degree to which an environment contains the resources and relationships necessary for a particular life form to persist and develop. A refugium that lacks habitat suitability is merely a boundary, not a place.

The experience of mattering, the felt evidence that others hold one's life as worthy of attention, mattering corresponds to what ecologists call relational ecology; the network of interactions between organisms that sustains a refugium as a living system rather than merely a bounded space. A refugium populated by isolated, non-interacting organisms is not viable in the long term; it is the density of meaningful interaction that generates resilience and the capacity for eventual recolonisation.

Liminality in the BML framework is a specific experience of threshold-crossing in the absence of adequate structural support, of being in the in-between without the scaffolding that makes passage possible. In refugia, liminality is the landscape condition, the terrain between the hostile environment and the refugium. Organisms navigating from depleted or dangerous habitat towards refugial shelter must cross open, exposed ground, ground that is neither the devastated landscape nor the protected zone. The crossing requires tolerance of exposure, directional orientation and the energy reserves necessary to sustain movement.

Vulnerability - Entering the Refugium

The most significant contribution of refugia theory to the understanding of belonging for care-experienced young people lies in what it reveals about entry. It is a risk. It is, in the precise sense of the term, an act of vulnerability.

Martha Fineman's (2008) vulnerability theory argues that vulnerability is the universal and irreducible condition of embodied human existence. All human beings are vulnerable; what differs is the degree to which the institutions and relationships surrounding them provide responsive and protective structures. Care-experienced young people have been placed, by the failures of systems and relationships, in positions of unmitigated vulnerability without the relational responsiveness that would ordinarily buffer it.

Brown's (2012) concept of wholehearted living, the willingness to engage fully with life and relationship without armour, names the experiential dimension. The willingness to cross the threshold and enter the space of potential belonging even in the knowledge that the space might, once more, fail, is acknowledged here.

We can also head back to Bowlby (1988), who argued that healthy development requires the presence of a trusted attachment figure from whom the child can venture outward and to whom they can return; a base that is reliably available and reliably responsive, so that the cost of exploration is underwritten by the certainty of a safe return. For care-experienced young people, the absence of a consistent secure base across their developmental years means that the capacity for relational risk is unlikely to have been adequately developed or has been actively suppressed. The construction of a relational refugium must therefore address not only the structural conditions for belonging but the relational conditions for vulnerability.

bell hooks concept of homeplace (1990) as a site of resistance argues that for Black communities under conditions of structural oppression, the creation of a domestic space of care and nurture, a homeplace, was a radical political act; the deliberate construction, within a hostile landscape, of a space where humanity could be affirmed and recovered. hooks's homeplace is a refugium; bounded, protective and generative. Crucially, hooks argues that entry into the homeplace required its own form of courage, which is the willingness to claim one's humanity in a world that systematically denied it. The parallel with care-experienced young people navigating the relational landscape of post-care life is that the act of entering a space of potential belonging is, for those who have learned to expect rejection, an act of resistance as much as it is an act of hope. I further argue (regularly) that cultivating belonging of itself is an act of resistance during the divisive times we’re living in.

Liminality as the Landscape

The concept of liminality, which I have offered some more thinking on here and hosted a six-part podcast series on here, has its origins in Arnold Van Gennep's (1960) seminal analysis of rites of passage. Victor Turner (1969) developed Van Gennep's analysis by examining the social character of the liminal phase. Turner argued that liminality is marked by communitas, a temporary dissolution of ordinary social structures and hierarchies that creates the conditions for a different kind of human connection.

For care-experienced young people, the transition from care is a liminal passage of particular structural severity, a structural abruptness that has no equivalent in the developmental experience of young people raised in stable family environments. In refugia terms, the ‘cliff edge’ is the absence of a bridge, navigated without the relational infrastructure that would make the crossing survivable.

The relational refugium, constructed at or around this liminal threshold, has a specific function in this analysis. It is the structure that makes the liminal crossing possible, the bridge that ensures the threshold can be crossed without the exposure of the open terrain becoming lethal. The refugium is the relational infrastructure of the liminal passage.

Care Leavers and the Conditions for Flourishing

Refugia, as Tsing (2015) emphasises, are not naturally occurring in damaged landscapes; they are produced. The construction of a relational refugium for a care-experienced young person requires deliberate, skilled and sustained effort. It requires us to create an environment where the quality of their relational engagement is not incidental to their role but constitutive of it. Belonging cannot be delivered through procedure; it must be created through relationship (Cherry, 2022).

The legislative reforms introduced by the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the relational programme represent the most significant policy-level investment in refugia construction, arguably, EVER. These reforms are not without complication and I will be writing a post on what Local Authorities can do to roll this out well at a later date. For now, let’s hold on to the possibility that we have before us.

A relational refugium is only as effective as the degree to which the young person can enter it and entry requires the enactment of vulnerability. For care-experienced young people, the conditions for this enactment must be deliberately cultivated.

The transition from care is the moment of greatest exposure and potentially, greatest openness. The relational refugium must therefore be maximally available at precisely this threshold moment.

Flourishing Beyond the Refugium

The ecological concept of refugia is generative precisely because it includes, within its logic, the outward spread of life from the protected zone into the wider landscape as conditions allow. A relational refugium that functions only as a closed shelter that creates belonging but contains it, that sustains the young person but does not equip them to move outward has not fulfilled its deepest purpose. The ultimate aim is that the young person should find a place of safety but that from that place of safety, they should be able to build a life of increasing breadth, connection and self-determination.

My BML Framework is about belonging that is real and rooted, that can be carried outward into new relationships and new communities, rather than belonging that is contingent on the continued presence of a single service or a single practitioner. The refugium, on this account, is not the final destination but the place from which the journey into a fuller life becomes possible.

Implications for Practice

First, practitioners must understand themselves as constructing environments, not delivering services. The relational refugium is an environment that must be created through the quality and consistency of relational engagement. This understanding has implications for supervision, caseload management, team culture and organisational design. Services that routinely reassign workers, that prioritise throughput over relational continuity or that treat the quality of practitioner-young person relationships as a personal bonus rather than a professional responsibility are structurally hostile to refugia construction.

Second, practitioners must actively cultivate the conditions for vulnerability-enactment in the young people they support. This means attending to the mattering dimension of the BML framework, to the repeated, behavioural communication that the young person's life is significant, before and independent of any expectation that the young person will invest relationally. The refugium must be made attractive before it can be entered; the conditions for vulnerability must be created before vulnerability can be enacted.

Third, employing organisations must recognise the liminal transition from care as a period requiring intensified rather than reduced relational support. The logic of service thresholds by which young people are moved from children's to adult services at the very moment of maximum liminal exposure is directly contrary to the requirements of creating refugium. Extended Personal Adviser support, Staying Close and the Enduring Relationships Programme are not optional extras; they are the structural provisions that make the liminal crossing survivable (and they are a starting point).

Fourth, hold the long view; orient the work not only towards the immediate safety and stability of the young person but towards the conditions under which outward movement into a fuller life becomes possible. This requires attention to the young person's emerging identity, their networks of relationship beyond the statutory system and their developing sense of themselves as people with something of value to contribute.

Conclusion

I have presented here the concept of refugia drawn from ecological biogeography and brought into social theory through Tsing (2015), hooks (1990) and my own analysis as a way to understand belonging for care-experienced young people.

When practitioners, systems and policies create the structural conditions for belonging, they are constructing relational refugia that are bounded, protective and generative environments in which the developmental processes foreclosed by relational deprivation may, in time, resume.

The existence of a refugium, however, does not guarantee its occupation. Entry requires the enactment of vulnerability that care-experienced young people may find profoundly difficult, given the relational histories they bring with them. Vulnerability is the enacted risk of crossing from the hostile landscape of prior relational experience into the conditions where belonging might, at last, be possible. It is the courage, in Brown's (2012) terms, to be present without armour and the willingness, in hooks's (1990) terms, to claim one's humanity in a world that has not always affirmed it.

The liminal transition from care is the moment at which the refugium is most urgently needed and the conditions for vulnerability most fragilely held. The reforms introduced by the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and MacAlister's (2022) relational programme represent an historically significant investment in refugia construction at precisely this threshold moment. They are necessary, and they are overdue.

But they are not, on their own, sufficient. The work of relational practice is the work of making entry possible, of creating, through the quality of sustained human attention, the evidence that the threshold is safe to cross.

Where belonging takes root, life spreads outward. The refugium is not the endpoint. It is the place from which everything else begins.

Note - The spaces of refugium during the liminal space have long been tended to by care experienced activists who work extensively on creating Refugium. Currently, my mind wanders to Kyla Chandler’s work with young people, Terri-Anne Hamer’s work around care experienced parenting, Lucy Kate Barnes’ work in setting up Lawyers Who Care, Terry Galloway’s work on creating spaces for young people to learn how to wire a plug (for example), Steven Russell’s work with asylum-seeking young men. There are so many people…

References

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.

Cherry, L. (2022). The brightness of stars: Stories from care experienced adults to inspire change (3rd ed.). Speechmark.

Cherry, L. (2025). Weaving a web of belonging. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, c. 21.

Department for Education. (2026a). New law to keep brothers and sisters together in care. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-law-to-keep-brothers-and-sisters-together-in-care

Department for Education. (2026d). Enduring relationships fund: £8.4 million to keep children in care connected to family. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/enduring-relationships-fund

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hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. South End Press.

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MacAlister, J. (2022). Independent review of children's social care: Final report. Department for Education.

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Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.

Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. University of Chicago Press.

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