04/06/2026
I’ve just sat down to start reading through the findings from the Child Safety Commission of Inquiry. I guess I’m supposed to tell you I’m shocked, mortified, in disbelief. But so far it’s just a reminder of what I have known, what we all have known for a long time.
If our kids are a barometer of how we are going as a society, oh boy do we have some fixing to do.
I’ve been arriving at this destination as a youth worker, a founder, a mum, a foster mum and hell a tax payer for a long long time.
The last couple of years; we, Emerge had become intertwined with the Child Safety system. We accidentally found ourselves receiving referrals and providing care for really complex kids who were hard to “place” everywhere else.
For ten years we had been working with the really tough kids locally, and we never really worried about what their child protection status was; in social enterprise cafes and crisis support, boxing and wrap around support, we just got in and did whatever they needed together.
Our Emerge home was only ever created for kids in our programs to have a safe, family like environment to compliment all the other stuff we were doing; By day, working on learning and building skills for their future and by night and weekends eating real food, building connection and relationships with committed adults, learning to love your home and live with other people and absolutely the ability to be a kid first and foremost at the base of our approach.
I guess we did a pretty good job, all of our data points towards increased belonging, reduced youth justice involvement, improved housing stability, reduced substance misuse and improved wellbeing and emotional regulation to name a few markers we collect. But for me the evidence sits in the real stories of the kids if you ask most of them, they report back that Emerge felt like family.
There’s still a whole bunch of them who are either hanging around as mentors, youth workers or just carrying what they learnt with them and sharing it with the world, doing good things in little ways.
Now I’m absolutely not pretending we have all of the answers, or we worked miracles with every kid that came through our doors we don’t and we didn’t, It looks as though from this inquiry Emerge and providers like us have only been working with about 7% of the young people in care who were tough to place and engage, but for me personally the timing just feels right for where I’m at in my life and next adventure.
With the closure of our Toowoomba operations, and a reset of Emerge, my board have given me permission and space to spend some time learning and creating something new (yet actually our original vision) which is creating a home that loves broken kids back to life, there’s the creation of a physical home in this yes but for me it’s a model, a relational real giving a s**t about our kids approach.
Learning from what we’ve done really well in this space, and even what we did badly, learning from others and listening to kids to build something that brings relational youth work, safety, family and home together.
I’m not interested in ragging out anyone or governments that got it wrong but just taking some time and space to bring something real and relational to the mix.
There’s a much bigger picture and work to do here to create something that really changes kids lives, and I want to be part of it.
I asked ChatGPT to create a picture of me doing that, it added one too many sausage dogs, and I’m not sure where my arms are. But it pretty well got it right 🤣😜😉
