Social Work Spotlight - Episode 49: Mat

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

In this episode I speak with Mat, a Social Worker who was born and raised on Darkinjung country in the Central Coast of NSW. Mat has a history of working in not-for-profit organisations that support children and families and was formerly the operations manager of Central Coast Family Support Services. Mat hopes that this conversation about his social work journey and experience helps others who are interested in this line of work.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Kids Outreach International - https://www.kidsoutreach.org/Teen Challenge - https://teenchallengeusa.org/Triple P parenting course - https://www.triplep-parenting.net.au/au-uken/find-help/triple-p-online/Bruce Perry and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics - https://www.bdperry.com/Bessel Van Der Kolk - https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/ACE Study: Adverse Childhood Experiences - https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.htmlBruce Perry’s - The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook https://www.boffinsbooks.com.au/books/9780465094455/boy-who-was-raised-as-a-dog-3rd-editionARACY, Better Systems, Better Chances - https://www.aracy.org.au/publications-resources/command/download_file/id/274/filename/Better-systems-better-chances.pdf1-2-3 Magic - https://www.123magic.com/Circle of Security International - https://www.circleofsecurityinternational.com/Bringing Them Home report - https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-report-1997NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian - https://www.ocg.nsw.gov.au/Oprah Winfrey & Bruce Perry in conversation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUAL8RVvkyY&ab_channel=SXSWEDUDaniel Hughes (Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy - http://www.danielhughes.org/Dr Dan Siegel (Psychiatry Professor) - https://drdansiegel.com/Richard Rose’s Life Story Therapy - https://tlswi.com/about-tlswi/This episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pgnZlMBj-_oOc8KoTu7q5l0qZBk1SBUyrxj24Pl2bCM/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmin McKee Wright, and today's guest is Matt, a social worker who was born and raised in Dakinjan country in the central coast of New South Wales. He is husband to Naomi and father to Noah and Bodie. Matt has a history of working in not-for-profit organizations that support children and families. At the time of recording this podcast in 2020, Matt was the operations manager of Central Coast family support services. Shortly after recording, Matt unfortunately had a stroke. He spent a week in hospital and many months doing rehab.

It took over a year for Matt to have recovered to a point that we were able to finalise this podcast episode. Matt hopes that this conversation about his social work journey and experience helps others who are interested in this line of work. Thank you so, so much for coming on board and being part of this podcast, when did you become a social worker and why did you choose this profession? Well, thank you for having me, Asman. Like I said to you, before this, I've listened to your other interviews and it's very exciting what you've started up here and to be part of this conversation.

So thanks for having me. I became a social worker. I finished my Bachelor of Social Work in 2016. So I'm a relatively new social worker. I've been a social worker for four years now. in a nutshell, the way that I answer that question is that when I was a very young child, I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to help other kids. So I've kind of always had this sense of wanting to help people and especially wanting to help other kids. And I've known that I've wanted to do that my whole life. I just didn't know what a social worker was when I was a child.

And it probably took me a long time to figure out exactly what the best words were. to describe what I wanted to do. And when I found out about social work and how social workers are kind of a jack of all trades, master of none that draw on all of these different discourses and research and information and figure out how to support people at the point that they're accessing systems,

I thought that's exactly what I want to do. Because I kind of, I started studying primary school teaching, I started studying computer science, neither of those kind of really, fit with my values and what I wanted to do. And I think it must have been one of the subjects I did in teaching where they were talking about social workers and psychology. And I kind of looked a little bit into psychology,

but thought that's probably a little bit more down the lines of research. And I really had a passion to support people and to work with people. And so I think I must have been at uni. I looked into social work and thought that is really a line. with my view of the world, with my own values. And so I'd kind of done a year of primary school teaching. I've done a year of computer science.

And I thought I won't jump straight into social work in case I don't like it. I thought I'll just start off with a certificate for in community services. Because at least if I hate it, like I kind of didn't enjoy computer. I enjoyed computer science, but, you know, they weren't my people. So I kind of decided to pull out of that. And then I was enjoying primary school teaching. but then I had an opportunity to work with a lot of kids and that kind of I was only in my early 20s then. I didn't have children of my own so that freaked me out and so I decided not to do primary

school teaching. So I'd kind of done two years of uni but I had nothing to show for it. So I thought I'll do a certificate for in community services. So at least if I hate it, I've at least got a certificate for in community services. But it turns out that I loved it. So I went on to do my diploma in welfare and I continued to love it. So then I used that diploma to get a year. year, the first year off my social work degree through Chelster University and started studying social work. And I studied social work over seven years. So I did it quite slowly. I was working full time through the whole degree and just doing one or two subjects at a time. But I really enjoyed because I was working in the field in refuges and residential care and foster care. And I really

enjoyed the opportunity to do it slowly and to really think about the subject. And I really think about the and relate them to my work. So my work informed, you know, what I was researching and what I was writing about in my essays, but then also the research and the essays that I was writing were informing my practice as well. And was there a point either while you were studying or while you were working, because you were kind of doing them concurrently, where you really felt that this is the direction you want to go down, that you'd made the right choice? Yeah, look, probably when I started working. So when I, when I started even the computer science degree, I started volunteering at a local like soup kitchen, a place that supported homeless people with free meals. And so I was kind of

volunteering there one night a week. I ended up getting involved with kids outreach international through a contact that was at the church that I was going to at the time. And we went to Russia and worked in orphanages and summer camps. And so I could. kind of was doing this work because I left school early. I got into a trade, did painting, painted houses for four years and then had my own painting business. And I kind of knew that that wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I really enjoyed the side of it where I was going into people's homes and helping them, probably more than the painting aspect. And then so I was doing volunteer work and trying to do what I could to support the community outside of that. And

probably at that time, even before I started studying social work, I knew that this is what I wanted to do with my career, with my life, was to work in positions where I was supporting people who were very vulnerable and who were having trouble accessing services. And so, coincidentally, my first job, I went to Russia, volunteered in some summer camps over there, and just happened to see that there was a drug rehab over there called Teen Challenge. And I went and visited the rehab and when I got back to Australia, my first job in welfare was with Teen Challenge. They rang me up and said they'd heard that I'd visited them in Russia and offered me a job working in their residential program.

And so I took the job while I still have my painting business and had my first kind of formal introduction to welfare in drug rehab. And that was an incredible experience. I was completely unprepared and overwhelmed by. the experience but I really enjoyed kind of being in a position where I could support men in that rehab it was a men's rehab to think about or just to support them where they were at with whatever it was that they needed support with and so my first formal job again just reinforced the view that this was definitely a pathway that I wanted to continue on and that's when I started studying

the certificate for in community services. And so like I said, probably from my experiences as a young child having this desire to help other kids and to help other people was probably always there. And it just grew with every opportunity that I had to work with people and support people. Yeah. And the volunteering experiences reinforced that. And then my first job in rehab reinforced that. And then I moved into working in residential care for children and young people who were escaping violence or abuse and neglect and worked in a couple of community-based refuges where we could house them for short periods. One was kind of a medium-term program where that were kind of a little bit settled and we'd

helped them almost a case management model, helping them to set goals and achieve those goals mostly around employment, education and getting their own independent accommodation. And then I worked in a crisis refuge where we supported children who were leaving or escaping situations and needed just emergency short-term housing while they figured out what the next steps were. And so again, that just reinforced to me that this is, I really enjoyed that. Really enjoyed kind of listening to their stories, supporting them and studied my diploma through that period and so by the time I got into my, started my social work degree, I knew 100% that was fit with my values. That's what I wanted to study. Yeah. And how long were you in Russia?

Oh, just for two or three weeks at a time. Three years in a row, I went over there just for two or three weeks. How did you find the language barrier and cultural barrier and just trying to make a difference there when one of the main communication tools was taken away from you? I mean, I was very young. I was probably 20 the first time I went there, and that really opened my eyes to systemic differences in different political systems. I became very aware of our Western capitalist democratic society, as opposed to the Russian communist, you know,

and communism that Berlin War fell in the early 90s, It was, and it's, you know, capitalist now, but it was still a very different cultural experience to what we have here in Australia. And the language barrier was just only one of the confronting things that I saw. Yeah. And the language barrier, I guess we hired interpreters who were pretty fluent in English and pretty happy to just stay with us all the time and help and translate. And I formed quite a good relationship with a few of the translators because we spent a lot of time. with them. But it was incredible. I mean, we went to Siberia, which is right in the middle of Russia. You can't get a tourist visa to go there. So most of the people we'd met had never met a foreigner.

We had to go there on a cultural exchange visa to teach them about Australian culture and learn about Russian culture. Yeah, it was just, it was like stepping into a time machine going back in time, 50 years in terms of the, I guess you go there, I went there as an Australian looking for Australian problems and I couldn't see Australian problems because they had Russian problems which took me some time and probably a couple of years to really start to see some of the challenges that they were experiencing. So the first couple of years was really, you know, really exciting, meeting lots of people, working in these camps where kids were. were coming and lots of them were orphaned and lived in some of the camps, I think, full time.

But then, you know, some of the messages that we were getting was that, you know, these were places where the kids lived all the time, but their parents were in town, but the parents were just so used to giving up their children to the state to become comrades when they were 12 years old that, you know, 10, 20 years after the Berlin Wall had fallen, that they were still used to sending their kids to these camps now. They were like summer camps, but they used to be comrade camps where kids used to go and get trained in communism and becoming citizens of the state or whatever. So it was an incredible experience.

Yeah. Was there one particular scenario or case that you can think of that really set the Russian context apart from what you've now seen in Australia? Like what's an interesting scenario where you'd find that really different in of this is not an Australian problem. The first thing that's striking when you go there is that when you drive on the roads, they're not smooth at all. They're really bumpy and hilly and you kind of bounce them all over the place.

So there's like no kind of pride taken in how they build the roads. And then you go and see some of the buildings and they look like they're falling apart and the bare minimum has been done to maintain them. And you quickly learn that in Western society we have a sense of ownership and pride in our individual pursuits and building good things, whereas in communism, the state provided everything for you. So the mentality is almost that no one owns anything, that it doesn't matter what it looks like or how it appears. We kind of just build it, the bare minimum or whatever. And, you know, food is so cheap, like a loaf of bread,

a bottle of vodka costs a dollar, packet of cigarettes cost 50 cents, kind of the staples are so cheap, but then to buy something nice like a leather handbag might be like $400. So it's kind of this, the way that they view items is so different. The way they view material things was so different. Like, you know, just the work ethic, the first time we got there, they saw our passports and locked us in a room for hours. And we finally, the interpreters came and said, oh, sorry, they'd never seen Australian passport. They didn't know what to do.

so they just locked up and went home. A very different kind of customer service to what we might expect in Australia. You think you're about to be detained? Yeah. Or, I mean, another example. Everyone got on the plane. I was the last one saying by to the interpreter. I went, showed my passport, and they said, no, and yet, sorry.

And I got the interpreter over, and the interpreter said, oh, sorry, this plane's full. You can't get on it. And I'm like, oh, but I've got a ticket. And the interpreter's like, sorry, the plane's full. the next one leaves in seven days. So I just had to wait seven days for the next plane. Yep. No, it just doesn't happen here. Or if they does, there's a huge outcry as opposed to this is just normal. Yeah, but it just works. And I mean, they were some of the challenges, but then, you know, and walking around on the streets, everyone's very stoic. If I spoke in English,

often I'd get people coming up to me saying, you know, swearing at me saying, a medican. and I would say, no, no, I'm not a medican. I'm Osladi, I'm from Australia. And then they get really excited and be like, oh, offslari, like they've got this. They love Australians, but they hate Americans. So that was interesting as well. And so as a young, you know, 20-something-year-old,

I just opened my eyes up, I guess, to the advantage that we have and that I have in Australia, being a white middle-class male living on the Central Coast in Australia. There's so much that I'm. I took for granted before that experience and that experience helped me to see my life here in a very different way and to really start to notice what I did have, the advantage that I do have and start to think about how I can use that advantage to study and put myself in a better position so that I can help other people who aren't so fortunate.

In your current role, what does a typical day? look like for you. Okay, so at the moment I'm working in early intervention in a family centre where we, I guess our mandate is to provide support to any families on the Central Coast who are experiencing any stress. So it's kind of universal support for families to reduce stress so that parents and families never get to the point that they need child protection intervention. So we provide lots of home visiting and just meet parents in their home and kind of have a chat with them about who they are and where they're at and what their stresses are and what their strengths are and set a plan with them about how we can support them to overcome some of the barriers that they might be facing

or the stresses that they're experiencing. And we also provide lots of parent education courses. So evidence-based parenting advice for parents in groups or one-on-one. And so I'm manager at the moment and support a team of 15 family workers. So as a social worker, and I guess, you know, I've been managing for 10 years now, which is kind of different to direct practice social work. And I'm kind of always thinking about this as a social worker who's not providing direct practice. How am I still using social work values and theories in my support of staff, who are the ones who are using the theories in their practice with families.

So I'm a big believer that the same principles that we use to support families, but that we should use that in organizational management and supportive staff. And so a typical day for me, I guess there's probably no such thing as a typical day. It's probably more a typical week where I'm meeting with lots of family workers who might be social workers or counselling trained or social science trained. I guess in this centre and lots of the organisations I've worked in caseworkers and family workers have a wide range of qualifications and experiences that they bring to the role. And then we all work together with our different qualifications or experiences

to provide a similar experience for all of the clients that we're working with. And so I support staff, I guess, in thinking about how they're supporting families, helping them to reflect on their practice and think about whether, you know, there's different ways that we can maybe support families, thinking about what they're bringing to that interaction with the family. And sometimes I can offer support or advice. Sometimes I'm learning things, listening to them and what they're providing families. other times. We might have to think about who else we can kind of talk to or draw on to think outside the box or get the answers to the things that we're seeing in families where we might need more information or knowledge. So I guess I'm having lots of conversations with staff one-on-one, informally on the fly or through formal supervision, also in team meetings.

And I meet with other agencies, interagencies and network with other services. to think about how we can work together, to address trends in social issues that we might be saying in the families that we're working with and trying to reduce barriers to accessing services. And so the service I'm working in is we predominantly use case management, which is, you know, from the problem solving discourse. So it's all about kind of what is the problem, what can we do about it, who's going to do what and when are you going to do it by? We don't just like to look at the problems in the family. We always like to look at the problems alongside strengths

because we acknowledge that families have a lot of strength and a lot of capital and that everyone experiences challenges at times that they might need a supporting hand to work through. And so a lot of the work is really about kind of assessing, so doing a thorough needs and strengths assessment and then setting goals with the family. And so a lot of the conversations I have with staff are around kind of where they're up to in that process.

Are we at the beginning phase of the relationship where we're getting to know the family, we're building safety, we're kind of getting an understanding of what their strengths are and what their needs are? Are we in the middle phase where we're kind of prioritised and set goals and we're supporting the family to achieve those goals?

Or are we at the end phase where we actually need to start wrapping up and encouraging the family to see how much they've achieved? and that they don't need us anymore and we can kind of step out and they can continue achieving goals on their own without our support. Okay, so it sounds like a lot of your role involves creating a culture of caring and support and respect for different roles and experience, given that you've got quite a lot of people on your books who are not necessarily social work trained, but they have a lot of other experience and come from different backgrounds.

why would you say your role is made better by the fact that you're a social worker? My day title is operations manager. I'm proud that I'm a social worker and I identify strongly with social work. But I don't know if I'm a better manager because I'm a social worker. I think someone doing this role who's not a social worker could do it just as well, better in some ways. I think for me personally, being a social worker has helped my development. it's given me opportunity to kind of look at a wide range of professions and draw on different

discourses and theories from different professions like law, psychology, politics, sociology, you know, whatever it is. And that's been really helpful for my development. But definitely, you know, lots of staff I work with who aren't social work trained have, you know, challenged me in ways that the social work profession never has. as well. And I love, you know, one of the principles of social work that we take the power out of all of the relationships or looking at the power dynamics and making sure that power isn't being abused or used in a way that's unhelpful for people. And I think that's important as a profession as well, that we're not saying that we can do it better or whatever than other professions that we're actually see the strength in the other disciplines that we're

working alongside and that we all bring something different. And as a team or as a collective of different professions that we're always stronger, and we might be just alone as social workers that we always need to work alongside other disciplines, and that makes us stronger as a helping profession altogether. Yeah. And with the early intervention focus that you're, your organisation clearly has. Where do your referrals come from? What are your networks? Our referrals come from lots of different services and clients themselves can call us.

So I guess we advertise out in the general community that we're there. We're available to support any families who have kids under the age of 12. And so sometimes clients just might see that on Facebook or see that somewhere and give us a call themselves. Probably the majority of our referrals come from like family referral service we have on Central Coast, which is a health initiative to kind of meet families quickly, find out where they're at, and then refer them to appropriate services. So because we provide case management, we often get referrals from them, but we often get referrals from hospitals as well, psychologists, social workers, different health departments, schools, I guess all sorts of services. And it's probably,

probably, you know, ebbs and flows, as, you know, good stories are getting out there about us and people are hearing about us. They're probably more likely to refer to us at different times. Yeah. And I imagine that referral process wouldn't then just go one way. So you would identify then any other issues and be able to know when you've kind of hit your limit or who else you need to engage to solve a problem. And then perhaps a really strong, culture of feeding back to the person who referred to or the organisation to say this is what we have done and these are some recommendations yeah look absolutely families who are going through a lot of stress or really difficult things if they're able to kind of look at what they're going through

and go okay i need to go see a counselor i need to give senelink a call and i need to ring housing or whatever and they can sort that at themselves they don't really need us often we get families who so overwhelmed and they've got a lot of things going on. They can't see the trees from the woods and they just need someone to come in and walk alongside them and just help them to prioritize. And so our job is to help them to access mainstream services. So we're linking them in with Centrelink or health or the right people in Department of Education who can help them. And we're just walking alongside them for a limited period of time with the goal of then kind of stepping away and stepping out when the family's back on their feet and there they've got the links and the

connections that they need. And so it might be a person accessing any one of those services and any one of those services can see that the parents kind of presenting a bit stressed or they've got lots of other things going on that that one service can't resolve on their own. And that one service might say to that parent, why don't you go and talk to these other services and the parent's quite overwhelmed and just need some support to actually. access those services so that's where we might get the call to help them out. What would you say you love most about your job? Oh, I think I just love seeing change in people.

So any change, even if that's in myself, that I've learned a new thing. I love that. I love seeing when my staff, you know, have these, like, see change in their clients or learn something new themselves and have growth themselves. and I love seeing when clients have growth or we can see change because all of that change impacts on the child. And I guess everything that I do and I've been really lucky that I've worked for some amazing social workers who have helped me to hone in that all of the work that we do is about

getting the best outcome for the child. That's really about the child's experience that, you know, those key developmental years, what happens to children, especially in the first three years of life impacts. on every single health and mental health outcome that they'll have for the rest of their life. So if we can support families when their kids are young, it's going to have far-reaching positive long-term outcomes for kids. So I guess I love hearing stories of people achieving positive change in their life. That's probably the thing that puts the smile on my face every day and makes me feel like everything that I'm doing is worth it.

Yeah, and I think social workers see that change is not linear necessarily. So it's not as though there's this fantastic moment where everything just comes together. It is an accumulative thing. And sometimes there are backward steps and that's okay, but that's all part of the process. Yeah, that's a really good point because it's not changed like, oh, this person's arrived, they've made it. It might just be changed that you've planted a seed and you can see that the person has actually thought about that and is going to continue thinking about it.

I was doing a session today. So I've always tried to maintain a link to direct practice as a manager. Always tried to stay involved in some client work and hold a small caseload or do some kind of direct client practice. And I was running a parenting session today for a dad who just had this epiphany that, you know, there's a difference between encouraging good behaviors and noticing good behaviors in kids and trying to stop. challenging behaviours and just his epiphany that yeah if i focus on the good behaviours that's going to help my child to produce these good behaviours more often and so that's the thing that put a smile on my face today and i went out and said to one of my colleagues i had a win with this daddy like the penny

dropped and you you know you can spend a couple of hours kind of doing psycho education presenting parenting courses and if there's just one moment where you can see that a client has an epiphany or, you know, they get excited about it. That gets me excited because I think, yes, you've, you can take something from this. They say that if you do a lecture or you do a course, the person's maybe only going to take 10% away. So I definitely don't expect that when we're delivering courses, running programs, or working with families, that everything that we do is going to have. have a significant impact or make significant change in terms of those epiphany moments. But it's nice to see when they do happen.

And the other thing that I really enjoy is that we get to give families an experience where they've been heard. We've completely respected who they are. We've seen their strengths. We respect their choices that they make. And they have a really positive experience with our organisation in the way that they've been treated. and they can take that with them to, I guess, hopefully use as a template of how they deserve

to be treated in their own families or through other services or whatever. And so we're empowering them that they have worth. They deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, no matter who they are, what their experience is, you know, what their abilities are that they deserve to be treated with respect. Absolutely. What would you say the most challenging part of your job is? Look, I enjoy the challenges of the job. I've been working in the child protection area for about 15 years now. So I've seen a lot of challenging behaviour from clients. I kind of enjoy that side of it in terms of when clients are experiencing their own trauma or challenges, I enjoy the challenge of supporting them in that moment because I feel skilled and I feel equipped to actually. support them to make change in those moments. So I guess probably thinking about child protection,

some of the most challenging parts of child protection are the parts that I really enjoy and don't find that challenging. Probably the most challenging thing is just the volume of work and the level of need that you can see. And I can see on any given day that if I can just do X, Y and Z, I can make change, but I've only got X amount of time. So I have to choose. what is the best way to prioritize my time to make the maximum amount of change in family's lives. And that's hard when you can see that, you know, you could do more. But then it's a balance of self-care as well that you have to have good work practices that help you to maintain energy over a long period of time that we're in this for the marathon,

not the sprint. So we have to look after ourselves as well. We can't do everything. But I think then that challenge helps you to think smarter about the way that you're working, what are the best evidence-based ways that I can support families and realize change? So yeah, in summary, the most challenging part is the high volume of work that can come across your desk in child protection. And what does self-care look like to you?

What are your supports? Self-care, look, this is a huge topic. I participated in a research study actually recently. where a researcher was looking at this exact question of self-care because we talk about it a lot. We throw around the word self-care a lot, but there's actually not a lot of research done on self-care. Self-care to me primarily, I think, is number one, as a social worker, you're talking to families, you're hearing a lot of stories every day, which are quite traumatic. You're hearing a lot about people's traumas and life experiences and current situations.

situations which are pretty full on. And so for me, number one thing for self-care is to look after myself and have worked through all my own traumas or issues or whatever so that my own stuff isn't coming up and getting in the way of my practice with families. So it's been really important for me over the years to kind of pull all of the skeletons out of the closet, dust them off and have a good kind of sit down and face to face and work through them. work through my own kind of traumas and stuff. So I think that's really important. Number one, as practitioners,

to be aware of what we're bringing along to our work so that we're aware of the lens that we're viewing clients and the world through, and we're aware when maybe we're being triggered, and we can take care of that ourselves. So that's probably number one. And number two is probably being organized, having good routines and,

good relationships inside workplaces so that you can get the work done that you need to get done. And then number three is probably outside of work doing things that I enjoy, spending time with my family and making sure I take time to do the things I enjoy, which for me happened to be anything outdoorsy, camping, motorbike riding, bike riding. My kids are getting to a point now where they're starting to enjoy some of that stuff with me. I guess also you're responsible for supporting other people who are addressing different challenges, and they're all bringing their own backgrounds and experience and dealing with their own client groups. So there's a lot of responsibility on you.

It's not just your own smaller caseload that you're taking on. It's not just trying to make sure that the organisation stays afloat. There's a lot of expectation, and that can be really challenging. Yeah, and I really enjoy that. I really enjoy talking to practitioners about the support that they're providing for families because I learn so much from them. And I think, you know, supervision is a safe place where we can talk about what's working, what's not working, try things out, wrestle with ideas and kind of practice stuff so that

when we're going out to clients, we've already kind of had the practice stuff. We're doing it for real now. And so I love hearing the stories that staff. bring along of some of the practices and the challenges that they're experiencing with families. And I feel privileged to be part of that journey of them developing their practice or thinking about their practice, reflecting on their practice, because I learn so much as well as a practitioner. Yeah. Yeah.

What are the typical paths for you from here on? Because you've gotten to a point where you do have that responsibility. You've got quite a good level of expertise behind you. you, where do you see yourself going next? I'm where I want to be right now. Like I said, my kind of inner drive has been to support children. I'm really lucky now that I'm working for an organisation that supports six to eight hundred families per year on the Central Coast where I grew up myself.

I have a real passion and connection to the Central Coast. And I feel really privileged now that I'm in a role where I can be involved in, organizational culture and supportive staff who are supporting families who are looking after kids on the coast. So, and I've only been in this position for only nine months, nearly a year. So I'm really excited about this position and where this is going to lead and the opportunities that are going to come up over the next, you know, a few years in this role and the impact that we can have on families on the Central Coast. In terms of kind of, kind of, you know, further development. I kind of, I finished my social work degree four years ago and kind of had a year

off where I thought, I'm exhausted, I'm not going to study for a year. That year off from studying was amazing and it kind of turned into four years. And I kind of spent a lot of time thinking about this exact question, what next in terms of my own development. And so last year I decided to enroll in a law degree. And so there's a bit of a story behind that. My wife is a lawyer. She actually started studying social work. And when she did the law subject in the social work degree, she saw, I guess, the opportunity to support people in the barriers that can come up in the legal system. So she moved over into law and did her law degree and practiced as a lawyer for the last six years or so. and she's opened her own legal practice now, specialising in wills and a state, where she really

enjoys supporting people to kind of think about end-of-life planning, and she does a lot of work going into nursing homes and supporting people to make decisions about end-of-life care and that sort of thing. So she loves supporting people in that way. And so we've kind of talked about law for lots of years and working in out of home care in child protection. I had a lot of opportunities to work in the legal system, work in the children's court and the criminal court, supporting clients or making recommendations about care for young people. And I'm just got really fascinated in the legal system. And so I'm doing my law degree. I don't know where that's going to take me. I don't know if I want to practice law. I'll always be a social worker first if I decide to be.

a lawyer. But just the process of learning sounds really rewarding to you. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it. And so when I started working in statutory out-of-home care, it became really apparent very quickly that I needed to have a good understanding of the legislation because it's like this whole other world of rules and regulations that exist in that kind of pointy end of child protection once children have been removed from their parents and put into the care of the minister. And my wife was studying law, so I wasn't scared to kind of, you know, we were talking lots of legal stuff, I wasn't scared to dive into the legislation and case law. And I spent a lot of years in child protection reading the Children, Young Person's Care and Protection

Act, the regulations, the other accompanying acts that are associated with child protection, and a lot of the case law as well in terms of how decisions have been made for children to come into care or not. And then I had a lot of opportunities to work in the court system as a support person for young people or families or an assessor for families. So in residential care, often spent many a night in the police station and the courthouse with young people who were in the criminal justice system and saw lots of the barriers for them. often young Aboriginal children or young people who, yeah, were just having horrible experiences with the court system. And my frustration at that time as a residential care worker or a youth worker in trying to support them against this criminal justice system that just seemed to have so much power over them. And so seeing that and then later on moving into foster care and being involved in the court system for care proceedings when either the department was removing children and making recommendation to the court that they not be returned to the parents. I was often involved in my staff or myself doing assessment of potential foster carers or relative carers and just seeing some of the challenges in that.

Mostly for parents and for grandparents or kinship carers, aunties and uncles who were trying to have a voice in that system. And they had lawyers who, you know, some of the lawyers were amazing and really sat down and listened to them. But then other lawyers, there just seemed to be a disconnect and lack of the kind of soft skills or the things that we take for granted in social work where we respect the client and try to give them a voice and respect their self-determination.

and a lot of that was missing in the processes. So I've been around kind of legal stuff for quite a while. And when I was thinking about where to from here, and I thought about it for a couple of years, I looked into all sorts of masters and pathways that I could have taken. But I think law was the thing that I kept coming back to. So I just decided to throw my hat in the ring and start studying. And I'm doing that through Charleston University,

where I did my social work degree. And I've actually been really thrilled that the first three subjects that I've done have revolved heavily around understanding the injustices and barriers to accessing legal services that Aboriginal people face in Australia. And I'm probably learning more about that. I would have expected to have learned more about that in my social work degree. But I feel like even though I'm doing a law degree, I'm still learning social work principles or things that I can apply to my social work.

social work practice, which is great. Absolutely. And I think even just having an understanding of the legislation applicable to your field helps you know what the possibilities and limitations of the services and the systems that you work within and being able to articulate it to other people, I think that's really valuable even if you decide not to take that into a law career. Yeah, and the legal degree teaches you research skills, which I'm really enjoying, how to quickly research and access high-quality, relevant current information about how decisions are made

in our system. And, you know, I kind of feel like in social work I learn about the social development and history of humanity, which I'm now realizing happened in parallel with the development of the legal system. And they go hand in hand and compliment each other beautifully. And I'm discovering there's actually quite a few social work lawyers out there. there and it's this whole kind of specialized field of social workers who are lawyers or lawyers who are social workers. Yep, I have one former colleague who's studying at the moment and her passion is aged care. So I see her making huge inroads in that field.

You know, I'm going to study law part-time, one or two subjects at a time, so it'll probably take me five or six years and I'll just, yeah, and enjoy the journey as well, the same as I did with my social work degree. My wife and I have always said she's studying her master's now. We've always said that we'll just keep studying because it gives you a reading plan. It gives you some accountability to be constantly developing and learning new skills and new ways to support people. Have you seen many changes in this field over time?

What does that look like for the people that you're supporting? Yeah, there's been lots of changes in child protection. That's a hard question. There's been lots of changes, you know, in terms of Senate. reviews and recommendations from government that have completely changed the way that the system works. I think, look, first and foremost, I would say from my experience that the child protection system is a broken system. And, you know, I think this has actually been acknowledged recently and government is starting to do something about it where we provide very little support to

families early on and the more serious that issues become in families, the more money we spend on it. So, for example, you know, supporting families in early intervention is funded at a lot lower level than by the time children come into care. There's a lot more funding. And I think models from other countries around the world who do this well show that if you're providing a lot of more funding to support families when kids are young with accessing social services that they need to access, then you have a lot less children needing more intensive support and care later on in life. So I've seen a lot of families where I believe the system has failed them, and that's really hard to see, especially in residential care when I was working residential care to get a child

that's placed in residential care and to see that they've had, you know, 40 foster care placements where they've experienced abuse in some of those foster care placements is quite heartbreaking and, you know, wondering what happened for them to get to that point.

And, you know, when you're looking at the government paying residential care workers to look after kids, I often wonder why we aren't spending that money on actually supporting the kids to go home and be with their parents where it's safe to do so, of course, but providing that same level of support where they've got around the clock support or care from professional workers. Of course, it's not always safe for kids to go home and there are children who should be removed from their parents from very unsafe situations, but often there's

someone in the family who's safe, who can look after the kids or often maybe more support. could have been provided to carers to support that environment to be safe so they don't need to come into the out-of-home care system. And I can see, you know, the government is trying to change the way that we do things, but there's so many moving parts. There's so many organizations that provide foster care. Everyone kind of does things a bit differently. It's highly regulated in terms of making sure that foster carers are doing a good job of looking after kids and a lot of money goes into monitoring foster care placements. And there has been a change in the last year or the last couple of years, but the government is now actually giving foster care

organisations some financial incentive to actually re-look at whether it's now safe for this child to return home or it's now safe as someone else in the family, maybe a grandparent or an auntie and uncle or a sibling or someone who can look after the child. So that's been a positive change. But yeah, overall, I think that there's a lot more that could change in the system to get the best outcome for kids. There's a lot of good work happening in a lot of different organisations, but it's just so massive. I mean, there's in New South Wales in Australia, there's about 20,000 kids in state care, and 55% of them are living with relatives, 45% are in foster care. So there's a lot of kids and a lot of organisations and a lot of resources put into kind of monitoring those placements and making sure that people are doing the best job possible looking after children.

But I just wonder if we put all of that or more of that money into early intervention services, whether we would be in a position where there were less children needing to come into care because families are more supported. they've got more education around abuse and neglect, and they've got more positive parenting strategies. They're more supported by organizations and community networks, so there's less neglect or abuse and less need for statutory intervention. Yeah. So other than the financial incentives you've mentioned

and emphasis on early intervention funding and support, where do you see social work? in this field heading in the next, say, five, ten years, you've mentioned perhaps legislation reform, policy development, more awareness. What would you like to see over the next coming years? And I guess how does that tie in with your organisation's strategic plan? There has been some changes that are happening at the moment. And so the targeted early intervention reforms, which are happening right now, in terms of actually starting to measure outcomes for families across the state so that we can actually track what's working and are

families better off from the money that we're spending in early intervention. That's probably going to be five or ten years down the track till we can start to get a really good picture of whether what we're doing now is working. So I'm keen to kind of follow that pathway and to see how that changes for families. In terms of social work, role. I mean, social work in Australia is a funny thing. We've, you know, we've got our association, there's many social workers, but lots of social workers in, especially in child protection, aren't in social work identified roles. They're in caseworker roles alongside our colleagues in different professions or studies. And so we're contributing part of the conversation.

So I know a lot of people are interested in foster care and this type of social work. what would you recommend for someone who's wanting to get into this type of work? Are there places you'd send people if they wanted to do research, any media or good reading or websites? Yeah, so I probably have lots of recommendations in foster care, in out-of-home care, in child protection. Primarily, you're working with families and with people who are parenting children. And so whether it is the parents, whether it's foster carers, they're parenting kids. And I guess number one is having a good understanding of evidence-based parenting strategies. And so, you know, my number one recommendation is TripleP, which is, you know,

the number one evidence-based parenting program recommended by the United Nations. We're really lucky in Australia that TripleP was developed on our doorstep here by Matt Sanders up at Queensland University, and that's an incredible base parenting program. But practitioners just to kind of know, what are the recommended strategies for raising healthy, happy kids? So Triple P is an amazing course, and then, you know, there's so many other evidence-based parenting programs, like 1,23 Magic, which is kind of, I think of that as triple P light, there's circle security, which is based on attachment theory, and, you know, so many other parenting forces. So number one recommendation to anyone looking at working in foster care

is just to have that base understanding of what constitutes good parenting from an evidence-based perspective. And then I guess on top of that, especially in statutory out-of-home care, every child in that system has had documented or confirmed instances of trauma or neglect. So we know that these kids have had adverse childhood experiences. And so I guess that brings me to the ACE study, which was done in the 90s, recommend people to look into the ACE study and to understand, I guess, it's historical significance in trauma-informed practice. And so just a brief kind of summary, like for the 90s,

health professionals thought that one in a million kids were sexually abused by adults. and in the 90s we had all sorts of technological advances in being able to do brain scans and understanding how the human brain develops from birth and at the same time an insurance company in America decided to do this mass study of I think about 45,000 people to try to understand why adults were having so many health problems and to see if there was a link between their experiences as children and the adverse health experiences that are having as adults. So they commissioned the ACE study, which is the adverse childhood experiences study, and they looked at, you know, one of ten different things that they might have experienced as kids,

like physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, emotional neglect, physical neglect, whether anyone in their house had a mental illness, whether anyone in their house had been incarcerated. and they called these things adverse childhood experiences. And they found a direct link between the more adverse childhood experiences someone experiences, the more health challenges they'll face later in life. So mental health challenges or physical health challenges. And this was a massive study.

I've watched the interview where they interviewed the researcher who was collating all the data. So 45,000 people sent their surveys back. and he describes the moment that he collated the data for sexual abuse and one in four people said that they had been sexually abused as a child. And that was, you know, he just describes it where he broke down into years. And, you know, it was quite confronting for the organisation. And when they published, the research has been quite confronting for America and for similar white democratic. capitalist societies to kind of confront this data that abuse is rampant in our community. And so that ACE study is quite pivotal in the way that we look at how often children experience

trauma and different types of trauma they experience and how it impacts on their development and their health outcomes later in life. And in Australia, we talk about this often in closing the gap with Aboriginal families who have had generations of trauma from government policies and, you know, the massacres and all sorts of horrific trauma that they've been through for the last 250 years. And we can see quite clearly today in Australia that they actually have 10 to 20 years less life expectancy because of the trauma that they've been through. So highly recommend for anyone looking at foster care to look at the ACE study, it's been replicated many, many times and kind of started a lot of the work

in trauma-informed practice. Before the ACE study, you know, we thought the kids were resilient, didn't matter what happened to kids, they're tough, they'll get over it, and the ACE study and advances in technology and looking at how the brain develops actually shows that kids are so vulnerable and what happens to kids really matters. It forms and neural pathways that impact who they are and how they will be for the rest of their life. So it's so important that we get it right when we're supporting families to have safe environments for kids. Yeah.

So the ACE study, what else would I recommend? Then in terms of, I guess, you know, the system that foster care and out-of-home care operates in, it is a busy, there's so many things happening in this machine. And I guess understanding it in terms of our Westminster system that we have our three pillars of government, that when you walk into a casework role in foster care, three pillars of government are our legislature. So there's a whole bunch of laws written about how we do child protection. And I talked earlier about reading the Children and Young Persons Care and Protection Act to at least having some idea of the way that the legislation's written.

There's the executive, which is the executive branch of government, where the ministers sit over the main departments that we work with, which are family and community services, police and health. And often it's those three departments that are responding to allegations of child abuse and working together in what they call the joint investigation response team, which is acts, police and help, responding and each working together where a child is, alleged to have been abused where facts are looking at the child protection and whether it's safe for the child to remain in the home, police are looking at the criminal aspect of it and whether any charges need to be laid and health are looking at physical well-being of the child and

what interventions need to be put in place for their health, including counselling or sexual assault counselling to support them. And then there's the judiciary which is, you know, the courts who are looking at the evidence and making an order about, where the child should live and whether they should come into the care of the minister and the decisions that they make become case law, become part of the common law of Australia that other judges consider alongside legislation that's written for kids in care. So just kind of having a basic understanding of our Westminster system and how it works

helps you when you're in the caseworker position and you have, you know, all of a sudden that these kids you're responsible for. you have all of these requirements that you're obliged to fulfill and you're working alongside facts or police, health, Department of Education and kind of where all of that fits. And then also having a history of the way that child protection has unfolded in Australia, you know, from the government institutions and orphanages and the transition away from them in the 70s and 80s into home-based, foster care, some of the challenges that have happened in that. And I guess the best way to

get an understanding of all that would be the government's bringing them home report, which was completed about 2000, maybe 99, 98, which was, you know, a royal commission into the government's treatment of Aboriginal children in care. And so that's specifically focusing on Aboriginal kids and their experiences over the past couple of hundred years. But most of the kids in out-of-home care or Aboriginal children are massively still overrepresented in out-of-home care today. And the stories and experiences that they've been through

can help to get a really good understanding of the things that have happened in the past that haven't worked and why we need to work really hard today to make sure that children. in care have safe positive experiences where they can grow and develop and have opportunities that other kids who don't live in care have. And so the Bringing the Home Report is a massive report, but you can get a beautiful little book that just collates all of the stories together from people called The Stolen Children, their stories. And that's a really good book to kind

of get an overview of, I guess, what child protection, where it's been over the last two. a hundred years and might help to make sense of some of the policies and some of the reasons of why the courts and the department do things the way that they do today. And then I guess alongside that there's also the Office of Children's Guardian's Guardian, which so when the new Children, Young Persons Care and Protection Act was written in 1998, it gave powers to this Office of Children's Guardian and they are kind of like independent body that sets standards for out of home care. So, you know, the government acknowledged that they didn't do a good enough job and so they now fund an independent organization to regulate the out-of-home care industry.

And so the Office of Children's Guardian will go into every single organization, whether it's fax or a non-government organization, and they will review what they're doing and give them accreditation to be allowed to run foster care or out of home care services. And so they've got some standards. And I recommend, you know, if you're looking at foster care or working in that area, maybe a good place to start is just reading the OCG standards for out of home care. They kind of summarise a lot of the legislation and regulations and put it in words about the work that we do day to day and how we, you know, up all the rights of kids in care

and how we promote that kids in care have access to positive family relationships, positive home environments, positive educational experiences, a positive sense of identity, even though they might not be able to live with their family, that they're connected, and they have positive sense of who they are and where they've come from. So they're really good. And then I guess there's, you know, leading on from the ACE study and this understanding of trauma-informed care, I'd probably recommend a few different people. There's so much, so many resources out there and so much in information.

And so I can probably just talk about the things that I've read and that he's been most influential on my practice over the years. And so number one would be Bruce Perry and his work. So in America there's two main trauma centers. Bruce Perry runs one of them. He's a psychiatrist, and he wrote a book called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and other stories from a psychiatrist's notebook, where he just kind of documents his life working as a psychiatrist being pulled into all these horrific, traumatic situations. You know, it might be a mass shooting or a cult where the FBI have gone in and found numerous children. who have been abused or all sorts of situations and just his stories about trying to make sense of how to support kids.

And the book is based on one of those stories, the boy who was raised as a dog where that story is about a mum with a severe intellectual disability who has a child. And she finds a partner, another man who also has a severe intellectual disability. and he raises greyhounds and does a really good job, kind of raising greyhounds and racing them. And mum actually passes away. And when child services do a home visit, they see that the child's, you know, in a home with a man. And they don't feel a very good job for reasons that Perry explains in his book that they kind of think, well, child in a house is safe. And so they leave the kid.

And this man, who's not even bad with an intellectual job. disability raises the kid the best that he can, which is the same as his greyhounds and, you know, keeps him in a cage and feeds him and Perry gets called in, I think a couple of years later when the child's found and they're put in hospital and the doctors can't understand why this kid is nonverbal, he's throwing poo at all the nurses and everyone that tries to come near and scared, agitated, completely dysregulated and Perry talks about some of the steps that he used to kind of find out what's happening for the child and understanding of the child's experiences and helping the child to feel safe and then supporting the child to, I guess,

rewire or repair some of the experiences that he missed out on to the point that the child's able to function in society. And so he runs this program for the neurosequential model of therapeutics, which is a way of working with traumatized kids and kind of understanding the way that their brain has developed and areas of the brain development that might have been missed and strategies that we can use to help to repair those parts of the brain. And so the neurosequential model of therapeutics or the NMT, that's like a full master's course that you can do.

And I've had the privilege of meeting Bruce Perry and learning about his NMT and where, working alongside people who are trained in his master's program and working with the NMT and supporting clients with the NMT. And it's incredible and saying some really good outcomes from it. But his book, The Boy Who's Races as a Dog, is kind of his journey in understanding traumatized, abused children and how to treat them. So I highly recommend that book. And then it was a few years ago Oprah Winfrey heard about Bruce Perry. And Oprah runs her schools in Africa and she interviewed Bruce Perry and did a full segment talking to him and I loved

the way that Oprah is kind of able to summarize years and years of work. At the end of the interview with Bruce Perry she said that the main thing that changed for her when she was talking to him and working with him and invited him into her schools and learning from him that being trauma-informed, She said that she's learnt before meeting Bruce Perry, she would think what is wrong with this child? What's wrong with this person? You know, why are they behaving this way? What's wrong with them? But now after working with him and learning from him, she now knows that the right question to ask.

Well, the question that she asks, which helps her to have a trauma-informed perspective is what happened to this person. I think that's really powerful. You know, often we work with clients who are angry. acting out, having behaviours that are quite confronting and it's easy to think what's wrong with them. But as practitioners, we can think what happened to this person. It helps us to see their behaviour through a lens of their experiences and helps us to be open to starting to think what we could do to be able to support them in that moment. And she's also someone who's, she's spoken up about childhood trauma for herself in the past. So that would be a really interesting interview. I've actually

just found it on YouTube. So I'm going to link that in the show notes for people to see. So that'd be great. Bruce and Oprah actually working on a book. They're going to write a book together about this journey that they've been on together because in a boy who was raised as a dog and in his lectures and having been involved in a lot of stuff with Bruce Perry. He is an amazing smart man but he is a scatterbone and he has all these amazing ideas and the boy who was raised his dog is edited by someone who I think has helped him put all of his ideas together and I'm really excited to see what comes out of the work with Oprah and her ability to communicate and you know I'm really excited to read their book when it comes out the other trauma guru who I have so much

respect for is Bessel van der Kolk. He wrote an amazing book called The Body Keeps the score. I've also had the privilege of meeting Bessel and listening to him. He's amazing. Again, he's medically trained. His book is like his journey through working with veterans coming back from war who had shell shock and working with them and trying to understand their PTSD and just the wording and the diagnosis and treatment for PTSD and adults, and then also relating it to his work later on with children and not just acute one-off instances of trauma that happen in things like war or car accident, but this developmental or relational trauma that happens through the developmental years where kids are traumatized by the person who's meant to keep them safe.

he's still advocating and working on a diagnosis of developmental trauma disorder in the DSM. He will continue working on that. But his book, The Body Keeps the score is incredible in terms of the brain's connection to the body and how trauma doesn't just impact on our brain like Perry talks about, but it sits in our body. He talks about the brain is connected to the body through the nervous system, or we have a little bit of our brain in our stomach. You know, we might feel that when we feel sick in the stomach if we're anxious

or we get butterflies in our stomach if we're excited. And this is actually where trauma sits and that trauma is a body feeling that impacts on our whole system, our digestion and everything and sheds a lot of light into why trauma impacts on our health and mental health that the ACE study talks about. So I highly recommend his book, The Body Keeps the Score. Other strategies for working in foster care and out of home care

would be having an understanding of your cognitive and talk therapies like CBT and narrative therapy that we're using in casework as kind of just the principles of supporting families to make change in the limited conversations that we're able to have with them. Looking at Dan Hughes's work, there's a lot of work on abuse and neglect with kids in care. There's some really good work on shame, why kids who have trauma have a lot of shame and what shame is

and how shame actually shuts down relationship-seeking behaviors. And Dan Siegel and his work on interpersonal neurobiology and his hand model of the brain, kind of like a really easy way to understand why kids might be flipping their lid and acting out. And then probably the last person I'll recommend now, an amazing social worker in the UK called Richard Rose. He's developed this life story therapy, which is an incredible narrative arts-based therapy for kids in foster care where you have about 10 sessions with a child and their primary carer and before your 10 sessions, you've thoroughly researched all of the child's

foster care placements and have a good understanding of their family of origin issues that led to them coming into care, their experience in the care system, the different foster care or residential care placements that they've had in the care system, and helping the child and their current primary carer make sense of their life story through our therapy. and stories over 10 sessions. And so at the end of the 10 sessions, what the child has is a book of their art that kind of explains their journey

of how they are where they are today. And so they've worked through, you know, some of the traumas that they've experienced. They've got a good narrative on why they are where they are and who they are at that point in time. So then they can use that narrative to explain to other things. people, you know, at school, they might want to show their book to their teacher to kind of

explain, this is who I am and where I'm at, but they might take out some of the pages of, you know, where they've been abused or some of the things that are too hard to talk to. They've had some opportunity to unpack that, but that doesn't need to be part of their narrative or this conversation. So it kind of empowers them to be able to talk about their experiences in care in a safe way and that's an incredible therapy which has been really exciting to see kids yeah kids and fair is in power to talk about their experiences so I've talked about a lot of different people and things and I'll maybe send you some links of some of those books and yeah they're the main people and theories that have informed my practice and yeah hopefully that's helpful for other people

up you interested. That's great. Thank you. I can tell from what you're saying that it's so important for those working in these areas to have a good understanding of the historical context to the legislation and the guidelines and the policies. But I feel like in foster care and out of home care, these are so often misunderstood areas of practice, especially for those not working directly in the field and not familiar with placement principles. Is there anything that you really want to highlight now where people really get it wrong in terms of foster care, early intervention, any myths that you'd like to bust? You mentioned placement principles and it would be amiss of me not to talk about them and the priorities of government at the moment. So I guess, you know,

in our Australian society, we're really lucky to have a child protection system, you know, like while I believe that it's broken and there's so much work that needs to be. done. It's still a very good system at keeping kids safe in lots of instances. And I guess, you know, there's so many experiences. It's very hard to generalize. So yes, maybe lots of people haven't had good experiences, but there are still lots of good experiences that happen in the system. Overall, the government is trying to support children to stay at home with their parents where it's safe to do so. That's the number one principle of the Act in the placement principles. And a lot of work and funding goes into supporting parents to keep kids home with them and to have safe,

strong relationships with their kids. That's number one priority. Where it's not safe for kids to stay at home with their parents, then the second priority and the placement principles is to find someone else in the family who can care for the kids because we want to keep kids connected to their family, their identity with people who, who know, who love them and careful them. And interestingly, you know, this is a huge area because it might be the only safe family as someone who's never meant the child before. And so it can be quite challenging to find family.

Mom and dad are isolated from their family or children are born in situations where they're not connected to their family. We could be putting kids with people who are strangers, but they're still their blood, their identity, their culture, their practices and the stories. They know, you know, just the stories about, yeah, I've brought up with your mom or your grandparents and these things that we might take for granted, they're missing in foster care or unrelated care where children grow up in foster care and don't have that connection for family.

And so that's why the second priority for kids is to be with family. The third option, I guess for non-Aboriginal kids, would be adoption. So looking at where it's not safe for them to stay with family that will try to find another family where they can stay connected to for the rest of their life. And the last option now is foster care because we know that foster care is temporary. It's only until 18 and often then kids fall through the gaps at 18 because they've been disconnected from their family of origin and their foster family may or may not continue to support them after 18. My preference would be under legislation to then find an adoptive family where they're connected with that family for the rest of their life. In Australian, we only do open adoptions where even in the adopted family the child regularly has connection and relationship with their birth family to maintain their identity and relationship with them.

The Aboriginal kids, it's different because government practices of the past of removing kids and forced adoption. an assimilation that we don't want to sever that tire from Aboriginal kids from their family. So if you can't find family for them, then we could look at the Aboriginal placement principles, which are about, you know, maybe there's not someone in their family that can be found or who is appropriate for that child to live in, but maybe there's someone from the Aboriginal family's extended mob or community from where they live or whether or born, Aboriginal kinship systems are quite different to our Australian, European family unit where we're more kind of a nuclear family with our connection through our bloodline, around

our parents, in Aboriginal community, their kinship networks mean that there's lots of connections to their extended family that are just as significant as their close family that we might look at and to other Aboriginal people in their community. So I guess there's a lot of work and I think the government and non-government organisations haven't been and still probably aren't very good at doing this work. And I've seen a lot of work being done to try to find strong Aboriginal people with knowledge to come in and support organisations to support Aboriginal kids and to support the development of Aboriginal organizations that can support Aboriginal families and kids in these areas because it has historically been white organizations trying to make decisions for Aboriginal families

and that has not worked out well at all. So I guess the more input there is from Aboriginal community into decisions around Aboriginal kids, the better it will be for Aboriginal kids. I would have to assume the added layer of disadvantage and difficulty accessing services or negotiating service barriers would make navigating that system more challenging in itself. Absolutely. I think there's plenty of Aboriginal people alive today who were part of the stolen generation who were removed from their family purely because of the colour of their skin, not because of any other reason. and Aboriginal families coming into contact with the welfare system today, there's a huge fear of discrimination and racism, and, you know, Aboriginal children are removed at 10 times higher rates of white children still today,

and calling it, you know, the next stolen generation, that there's still far higher levels of Aboriginal kids being removed from their parents today. And there's a whole other conversation that's probably more suited for an Aboriginal practitioner to have. I mean, I've definitely sought advice and spent many, many, many hours talking to my Aboriginal colleagues who have been very helpful and patient with me and helping me to understand why our systems don't work well for Aboriginal families. And I think the more Aboriginal people we have in positions of power, supporting their own people who are going through the system, means that Aboriginal families will have the option to be supported by people who have similar cultural experiences to them.

And that's, you know, based in 250 years of a whole bunch of events that have occurred, that have been discriminatory and racist and that we're still working through as the child protection system today trying to balance how do we keep kids safe? How do we support children who definitely are being abused and neglected? But how do we do that in a way that is based purely off the conditions

that they're experiencing without being discriminatory or racist? And how do we also support and be mindful of the fact that this government department that's doing this work today only 50 years ago was racist and was making racist decisions? And these families and people who are involved in the system might not see that it's changed or that we're trying to change. And so it's just there's a lot of work that still needs to be done. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Is there anything else before we finish up, anything else you'd like to mention about the work that you're doing or have done to potential social workers or social workers out there who might be interested in knowing a little bit more about the area?

Well, I think we've covered a lot of stuff. You know, working with kids, abused and affected kids, it's a huge area of work. It's highly complex. The government's involved. There's a lot of voices, a lot of research. and it's hard work, but it's really rewarding. And, you know, I still have been doing this work for 15 years. Kids in out of home care statistically have poor outcomes with their health.

They have poor outcomes in education or in education, poor outcomes in terms of rates of incarceration and early death. I've been to far too many funerals of kids who have been in care or visited far too many. kids who have been in care in jail, but I still run into kids who are now adults and stay in contact or they stay in contact with me. And it is delightful seeing kids or support her a long time ago now as adults and the things that they're achieving and the successes that they're having and they're having families alone now. And yeah, I just encourage anyone who's interested in supporting kids and families that this is an area of work where there's lots of work. We need lots of good people.

Yeah, you're obviously so passionate about it and you couldn't see yourself doing anything else. So I think just reassuring people that it's, yes, it's difficult, but so is most of social work and we wouldn't get into it if we weren't up for a challenge. And it seems like a really incredibly rewarding area of work to be in, like you were saying, especially when there's so much change and so much potential to make such a difference in people's lives. I love your international experience that you shared with us earlier and the fact that that kind of helped develop your social justice lens and your understanding of system impacts on opportunities and outcomes for younger people

and also your passion for diversifying and consolidating your skills through ongoing professional development. It's something so important that keeps you energized and keeps you feeling like you're doing a good job. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe something else I'll just say on our conversation before that frames my thinking that I should probably say that living on the Central Coast, living on Aboriginal land,

I often think about the parenting practices of Aboriginal people that have lived on this land for tens of thousands of years before us, the strong kinship community that they had, the complex law, that they had the incredible systems and relationships that they had working together in harmony with each other and in harmony with the land here, that we have so much that we can learn from Aboriginal people and their cultural practices that, you know, have been destroyed by European colonisation that has come in and completely decimated, you know, so much of the land, so much of their culture, so much of their people, and that I think it's easy for the system, which has, for the last 200 years,

viewed Aboriginal people as lesser than white people in terms of their parenting practices and that because they've viewed them through a white lens, you know, as social workers, our commitment to supporting Aboriginal people and looking at, and understanding of their culture, it's amazing and has so many more strengths in terms of their commitment to relationship than our capitalist culture has. And so I think that partnering with Aboriginal people, partnering with Aboriginal organisations and taking time to listen and understand is one of the best things that we can do as non-Aboriginal practitioners in understanding their experiences.

Through this, we definitely have so much more to learn from them. Yeah, so I'll just maybe finish on that thought. Yeah, I think that's a good place to leave it. But thanks so much again, Matt, for taking the time to speak with me. Would you be open to people contacting you if they had any questions, anything they wanted to ask further? Look, absolutely, I'm on LinkedIn, give them to find me on there, send me a message, and I'm always happy to have conversations around,

at any of these topics. Wonderful. Thanks again so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you, Yasmeen, for this podcast and all the work that you do supporting a social life profession. Thanks for joining me this week. If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Matt, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlightpodcast at gmail.com.

I'd love to hear from you. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show. Next episode's guest is Risha, who came to Australia as an international student in 2017 and completed a Masters of Social Work qualifying in 2019. She initially started working at Settlement Services International as a community hub leader before moving into the New South Wales Department of Education as a community liaison officer in Westmead Public School,

working with newly arrived culturally and linguistically diverse families to adjust to a new country through a wide range of programs. She now works at Ferros Care as a community development coordinator, leading various community capacity building projects in partnership with local stakeholders, NDIS, and people with disabilities. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you will notified when this next next episode is available. See you next time.