It's been just over a week since Shauna won the Young Change Maker Awards Watches of Switzerland Group PLC and The King's Trust England County Finals.

This is her experience.

“One of my favourite films is Wicked, it's because it resonates so deeply with my own experiences as a child who has lived within the care system.

Elphaba grows up carrying a label she didn’t choose. She’s judged before she’s known. Whispered about. Feared. Her difference becomes the story people tell about her, rather than the story she gets to tell herself.

That feels painfully familiar.

Many children in care walk into classrooms, meetings, and new homes already carrying narratives written by others:
“Challenging.”
“Troubled.”
“Hard to place.”

Rarely do we pause to ask what happened to you? instead of what’s wrong with you?

In Wicked, we learn that goodness and wickedness aren’t fixed traits. They’re shaped by circumstance, power, trauma, and who gets to control the narrative. Care-experienced children know this truth deeply.

Behaviour is language. Survival is often mistaken for defiance. Strength is frequently misread as risk.
And yet, like Elphaba, so many of these young people show extraordinary courage. They keep going despite instability. They form attachments despite loss. They hope despite systems that too often expect less of them.

The real tragedy isn’t that some children struggle.

It’s that we sometimes stop believing in their potential.

If Wicked teaches us anything, it’s this:
When we change the story we tell about someone, we change how we treat them, and that can change their entire future.

So here’s my challenge to all of us working with, advocating for, or influencing the lives of others:

Let’s be the people who see beyond the label.

Who ask better questions.
Who recognise that “different” is not “dangerous,” and that trauma does not cancel talent.

Because some of the most extraordinary people are the ones the world once called “wicked.””