Our CEO, Lucy Peake, has been invited to take part in a knowledge exchange with academics, policy makers, charities and social workers in Australia about everything to do with kinship care.
The three week trip, which is fully funded by The Creswick Foundation, is a unique opportunity for experts from different sides of the world to share ideas and look at how to make change happen. The invitation came after a visit to the UK last summer by Dr Meredith Kiraly, a kinship care expert from University of Melbourne.
Lucy will be presenting at two national conferences, running workshops in Tasmania, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, meeting a charity called Mirabel and learning from a group of young kinship carers who have set up a national pilot project.
During all of these events, Lucy will be sharing experiences of developing peer support, including our Kinship Connected programme, which sets up and runs support groups for kinship carers in the local community.
Lucy said, “I’ve been invited because of the work that we all do to transform support for kinship families, and I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to share our fantastic work and to meet people who are so keen to learn from us and to make change happen for kinship carers on the other side of the world. I’m very proud to have such a brilliant team and pinch myself that I get to spend three weeks waxing lyrical about the wonders of Grandparents Plus and everything we do.”
If you’d like to follow the journey, Lucy will be blogging about her adventures. Sign up to our network for our latest news and blogs.
The trip is being organised by the Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies. Lucy will be presenting at the Australian Social Policy Conference and the National Foster and Kinship Care Conference
