Despite past child protection reforms in NSW, child abuse and neglect remains a problem of high prevalence and incidents for South Western Sydney (SWS). From 2012 to 2014 SWS had an increase of 28% in child protection reporting, 18% increase of the number of children involved in reports and an increase of 9% for children entering in out of home care (OOHC).

Child protection clinical incident data within South Western Sydney Local Health District (SWSLHD) included the following issues in clinical practice; not identifying child protection, inappropriate transfer of care and not reporting child protection concerns.

A Child Safe and Child Aware SWSLHD Framework is being developed utilising the Australian Institute of Family Studies: The good practice guide to Child Aware Approaches: Keeping children safe and well in response to adult focused services not identifying adults as parents and children not being included in care planning or service provision.

The initial phase in the establishment of the framework was the development of a communication and key messages campaign and strategy targeting staff about the need to be child aware and having a shared understanding of the causes and impacts of child abuse and neglect.

The second phase was the development of a Child and Family Sensitive Practice audit tool, and was piloted within SWSLHD Drug Health Service. The audit tool outcome demonstrated the need to increase staff capacity to appropriately respond to families, including a review of all policies and procedures within a Child Safe and Child Aware SWSLHD Framework.

Current estimates from census data are that there are up to 50,000 kinship carers age 30 or under in Australia, mostly providing care through informal arrangements. Young kinship carers are an unrecognised cohort, yet many take on extraordinary challenges in early adulthood in order to provide care to traumatised siblings, nephews/nieces, and other young relatives or family friends. Considerable numbers of young kinship carers are single; some are also caring for children of their own. Many are forced to abandon their studies and employment, and they frequently live in poverty and overcrowded housing. Many face conflict with the children’s parents and members of the extended family in relation to the children’s care. Despite the burden of care, these young people are excluded from young carer programs unless a child in their care has a disability. They are not eligible for free child care such as is available to grandparent kinship carers, and they often find kinship support groups to be overwhelmingly focused on grandparent care.
This paper will describe research in progress to identify the support needs of young kinship carers, and present an innovative web-based support model tailored to the needs of these excluded young carers, together with current work to establish a pilot support service. The pilot forms a component of the ongoing research project Young and ‘care-full’: the support needs of young kinship carers that is supported by a major grant from the Sidney Myer Fund.

The 2484 postcode area (in northern-NSW) has higher than State-average rates of unemployment, child poverty, and homelessness (including 25% of those living homeless aged under 25 years). Yet, we know that we live in a generous community, with 1 in 4 locals engaged in volunteering activities. Noticing this, a group of residents living in the 2484 area have formed a collective to create a culture of generosity, responsiveness and, ultimately, a community that is thriving. This presentation shares the first 12 months of our efforts to activate a belief within our community that everyone may experience vulnerability at some point, and that responsibility for thriving rests as much with the people living in the community, as it does with government and social service professionals. The presentation will outline the It Takes a Town project, including the obsessions, guiding behaviours and broad strategies that we are using to create a common agenda and response that focuses on building a thriving community that wraps around children, young people and families to help them identify and move towards their aspirations for a better future (i.e. “Harnessing Generosity”, “Building Circles of Support”, “Creating Impact”). Building on a belief that connections between people living in a community can be harnessed to lead to new initiatives and approaches to creating opportunities for people to thrive, ITT has invited locals to make our obsessions theirs, and to respond according to their abilities, interests and resources. The presentation will also outline our theoretical framework and outcomes to date.