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Residential Program

 

Mercy Family Services in the process of establishing two new residential programs in Inala and Caboolture. These will be up and running before Christmas and will house four young people in each.

 

Foster Care Recruitment Campaign

 

The Department of Child Safety launched a Statewide Recruitment Campaign for foster carers in May 2008. The campaign has included television, radio and press advertising and has captured an overwhelming level of interest from the community. The campaign is due to finish at the end of August with the Department's statewide target being the recruitment of 500 new carers.

In January 2008, the Department commenced the Foster and Kinship Care Training and Assessment Services (F&KCTAS) funding round. All grant funded organisations who currently provide Foster and Kinship Care Services and Specialist Foster Care Services were invited to apply for no-recurrent funding to assist the Department with meeting the additional training and assessment needs of the new carers the Department intended to recruit through the campaign.

The Department aimed to select one Non-Government Organisation partner per departmental zone to work closely and collaboratively with them, primarily to deliver training to, and assessment of, Foster and Kinship Carers. Mercy Family Services was the successful agency in both the Ipswich & Western and the Brisbane North & Sunshine Coast zones.

Zillmere Foster & Kinship Care Program - Brisbane North & Sunshine Coast

Over half-way into the funding period and the workload for the team at Zillmere has increased dramatically. To date the team has home-visited over 40 potential foster care applicants and provided Information Sessions and Quality Care Pre-Service Training to those and many others. The workload has been made manageable by the fantastic partnership work that occurs with the zones' Placement Service Unit, who have also home-visited and co-presented training with MFS. The response to the advertising campaign in the Brisbane North & Sunshine Coast zone has been so amazing that there are still many hundreds of applicants to be visited, trained and assessed. It is anticipated that the coming few months will be filled with a significant amount of assessment work and the approval of new foster carers in the zone.

Ipswich & Western Zone - Foster & Kinship Care Training & Assessment Service:

In the first three months of the funding period MFS Goodna and Toowoomba have worked extremely hard to complete initial interviews on over 100 perspective carer families. This was only possible with the support of all the team members in the workgroups. In Goodna eight families have been through training with two having been assessed and awaiting approval and six awaiting assessment. Twenty-two more families will commence training on Saturday 6th September 2008. Toowoomba are in the process of completing 19 assessments; 23 households completed training. The participants have been given some time to complete their homework from training before allocating and starting their assessments - there are 14 households still to be allocated to a worker to do the assessment.

 

 
Updated 4 September 2008

Enquiries:

Contact: Executive Director
Tel: (07) 3267 9000
Email:  mfs.admin@mfsq.org.au

 

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