Foster Care

All children and young people have the right to be raised in a safe, loving environment and have access to the services and support they need to enhance their quality of life. Some families are unable to provide the protection, safety and support children and young people deserve. In these cases, children and young people live in accommodation outside their family homes. This is known as Out-of-Home Care or Foster Care. CareSouth offers Foster Care services in the Illawarra, Shoalhaven, Griffith, Deniliquin and Queanbeyan and there are currently 315 children and young people in Out-of-Home Care, ranging in age from 0-18.

CareSouth employs 33 caseworkers to provide around-the-clock support to those in Out-of-Home Care, along with Foster Carers and families.

CareSouth has 294 Foster Carers who provide a safe and loving environment for children and young people who are often unable to live at home due to abuse or neglect, parental mental illness or drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence or general family breakdown.

Foster Care can be for just a few nights, a couple of weeks or months or for many years. Foster Carers come from a range of backgrounds; they are young couples, same-sex couples, single people, have children of their own or are retired. Foster Carers who provide a stable, loving home with structured routines and firm boundaries can make a huge difference to the life of a vulnerable child or young person.

Lily (not her real name) was 17 months old when she came to live with CareSouth Foster Carers Carolyn and Ian Vaughan. The Shellharbour couple, who are in the process of formally adopting Lily, dreamed of weekend bike rides and friends’ birthday parties for the bubbly youngster. But first they had to help her reach key milestones like walking and talking.

The Vaughans also had to teach Lily how to hug.

“When she came to us she didn’t know how to connect,” said Carolyn. “You could pick her up and she would just leave her arms hanging.”

The Vaughans spent countless hours showing Lily how to wrap her arms around their necks and squeeze tight. The family called it a koala. Lily is now seven and still asks for a koala each morning.

“I have to sit on a chair now to give her a koala because she’s just too heavy,” laughed Carolyn.

Once Lily had learned how to hug, the Vaughans set out to teach her how to walk and within a month she was off and running. Now Lily has come full circle and has mastered riding a bike without training wheels. Mrs Vaughan acknowledges it has been a long road from those first toddling steps to seeing Lily flying around the footpaths on her bike. But the journey has been worth it.

“Somewhere everybody can make a difference,” said Carolyn. “It’s about being willing to give and willing to learn, because it’s sure taught us a lot. The children that come into care, don’t come into care because of who they are they come into care because of a situation they’ve been brought into and it’s not their fault.”

The Vaughans started their Foster Care journey as Respite Carers for a couple of sibling groups.

“Both of us are community-minded and we wanted to make a difference,” said Carolyn. “Respite Care was a way for us to dip our finger in the water and try it out for a weekend. We could see the difference it made to these children’s lives and we wanted to do that long-term.

“I said to Ian if there is a child who needs us they will find us. And then the phone call came. The day we met her it was just an amazing, amazing thing. I can’t find a word to describe the feeling. You know when you just know you’re in the right place at the right time,” asked Carolyn. “Well she just looked at us and that was it. This isn’t about blood, it’s about caring and families can be beyond blood as well.”

Residential Out-of-Home Care

CareSouth provides residential accommodation to children and young people aged 12 to 18 who may not be able to live in their family environment due to their complex support needs.

CareSouth has 25 young people in Residential Care across five residential units in the Illawarra, Shoalhaven, Griffith and Queanbeyan.

Highly qualified, experienced and dedicated staff provide a consistent and predictable environment that allows children and young people in Residential Care to feel valued and safe through the development of self-esteem, living skills and independence.

CareSouth residential staff work intensively with a clinical psychologist to provide a therapeutic, trauma-informed care environment. Staff also work collaboratively with other professionals, agencies and stakeholders to achieve the best outcome for the children and young people in our care. The service provides intensive case management to assist each young person to work towards an improved independent living option.

Our Place

Our Place is a therapeutic treatment model for children under 12 years who are unable to be placed in Foster Care. The model is based on Bruce Perry’s six core strengths for healthy child development and is tailored to meet the needs of each child in the program. Our place includes a professional parenting team, specialist caseworker and a “clinical conductor” who orchestrates the clinical component of the model, gathering all the specialists together to provide therapeutic interventions and a holistic response to the child’s individual needs.

The model is informed by the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) assessment and provided in a reparative care environment. The exit strategy and plan includes recruiting and transitioning children to Foster Care or family, integration into safe community activities, attendance at school full-time and positive contact with siblings, family and significant others.

Our Place aims to provide a nurturing home-like environment that maximises safety for the child, their carers and other individuals involved in their care. The Our Place model enables delivery of consistent evidence-based therapeutic intervention with frequent monitoring, reviews and outcomes assessment.

For most children, interventions and activities will involve building positive attachment experiences, promoting attention and developing self-regulation of emotions and impulses that underpin problematic behaviours.

The objective of Our Place is to achieve behavioural changes and improvements in the following areas:

• A reduction in incidents of harm to others, harm to self, absconding from the home, school attendance, safety and well-being, health outcomes, and a reduction of restrictive practices
• Building developmental/cognitive capacity across domains addressed by NMT
• Enabling the positive assimilation of children with extremely high needs (resulting from trauma) into schools and the community and permanency planning for foster care/kinship care placement

The house is decorated with safe but homely furnishings and colour schemes. Age-appropriate toys, books and outdoor equipment (such as sandpits, swings or trampolines) are provided to assist with the therapeutic play activities.

In addition to specific activities determined by the clinician, the staff at Our Place implement a predictable routine, appropriate boundaries and role modelling and support the growth of self-awareness and empathy.

CareSouth’s Our Place Model is built around a parenting team who are trauma-informed, work in crisis, are resilient and are creating positive futures for vulnerable children that are balanced, fun, happy, healthy, safe and stable. These are things that every child deserves.