The Process So Far

I thought it might be helpful to go through the process we have been through to get where we are now, which is approved to be a carer.

We are going through an organisation called Challenge. They provide a lot of services, particularly in relation to people with disabilities. They also have an arm for out-of-home care, or foster care.

Our first step was to call and chat with them about it. They sent Ashleigh out to our home to talk to us about foster care. We were able to ask lots of questions which was particularly important to us as we had a lot of questions either raised or unanswered from our experience applying to be foster carers through DoCS (another post sometime). She was able to put to rest all of the concerns we had from that time. For us they related to things like my husband working from home and having people come into our home, our faith which is such an integral part of who we are, visiting family, babysitters, visiting family interstate. Many of the issues come down to child protection issues at the end of the day. We felt our questions were addressed well. Probably the one that is a little open ended, as it depends on the children who end up in our care, is the one of faith. We are happy with what we know, just that it's a possibly complication for the future. The issue probably deserves a post of its own, so I won't go too far into it here.

Ashleigh left us with a lot of paperwork to fill out. There were forms for our doctor to sign off on, we had to get referees. Working With Children checks had to be done. Police background checks. Lots of questions about our backgrounds, families, friends, work, health, children, etc. It was very thorough. These took us a while to get through, and I can't remember if we got all of them at once, or if some came later. Either way there were a lot of forms.

For us the next step was the hardest to work out, and took us the longest to get to, slowing down our entire application. The training course. In NSW you are required to complete training called "Shared Stories, Shared Lives". We had no problem doing the training, it was more a problem of accessing training. My husband is a minister. He works on Sundays. All of the training courses are run on weekends. We live in the country, so they aren't exactly run every weekend. The first two that they ran (probably one each term) completely clashed with things at church. So we had to wait nearly 6 months to find one we could attend locally. We were at the stage of considering travelling half way across the state to go to one on a weekend he could get free.

The course itself was excellent. It wasn't run by our agency, but was run by an organisation that contracts out to run such courses. It was a combined one with people from our agency and Family and Community Services. We knew one other couple on the course. It was run over two days. It covers so much about foster care it's hard to know where to begin. It's based around stories of young people living out of home and examines what brought about their having to be removed from home, their behaviours, their long term situations, visits with their families, etc. Around their stories you get to spend time examining the issues like why children end up in foster care, what kinds of care they go into, the kinds of behaviours that are common in children who are in foster care as a result of their circumstances, the disempowerment these children and young people feel, visits with family and issues around that, parenting techniques that are appropriate/inappropriate with children in foster care, etc, etc. Again, there is a whole post in all of this. We had 11 people in our course, some with a history in foster care in another state, some looking to do respite care, one who found herself as a foster carer when a child in foster care ended up sleeping on her lounge. It was fascinating to learn from each one of their experiences, and we had plenty of great discussions. I hope we can draw off knowledge like this when we do start foster care.

Once we had completed our training the next step was the interview process. The same company who ran the course also did the interviews. They come from a different town to ours, about 4 hours away, so we had to wait until we could find dates that suited us both. This interview was conducted over two days, for about 3-4 hours each day. Our boys were also part of the interview for about an hour on the first day. This was really important to us and to them, as they were able to talk about their feelings and ask any questions they might have. They were pretty nervous about it though, and very quiet. The interview was very indepth and personal. There were a lot of questions about how we parent, our own family backgrounds and how that might impact, our motives for wanting to do foster care, etc. The issue of our faith came up again as we had to consider what would happen if a parent said they didn't want their child going to church. It's a tricky one, and like I said, something for another post. All of it is tricky because of the hypothetical nature of it too. So being asked what you would do if a child did x, y or z is so dependent on knowing that child and knowing your own emotions at the time. Very hard to imagine and very easy to talk the talk. Walking the walk will be another thing entirely.

After our interview process we waited until the local organisation had a meeting where they decided over applications. At that point we were called and informed that our application had been successful. In this time Ashleigh had moved on to another role within the organisation and we had been appointed to a new worker, Kristen. We have now got an appointment to meet her and another worker on Thursday this week to discuss the next step. For people starting out in foster care they like for them to do respite care first, so it is likely this will be a discussion to that end.

So that's us so far.