Thursday 13 October 2016
For Immediate Release:
New resources for youth centred foster care
Social Development Minister Anne Tolley today launched a new set of resources to help young people and adults to
understand foster care.
The resources have been co-designed by young people because fostering should be centred on the people in care. Young
people had input into the language being used, the messages being given and the relevance of messages.
“These resources reflect that we don’t work in isolation”, says David Hanna, Director of Wesley Community Action. “We
need to partner with the communities we work in. That’s our principals and schools, the whanau of young people in care
and Child Youth and Family”.
“These resources are a statement that our young people are at the centre of everything we do. This holds us to account
and broadens that accountability to everyone involved in a young person’s life”, says Hanna.
It covers the work Wesley does and the rights, roles and responsibilities that everyone needs to know. This includes
young people, foster parents, social workers, whanau and others.
Mr Hanna acknowledges the power adults have and that this needs to shift to young people in care and to whanau.
“We know from our years of experience in this line of work that if we take the time to listen very carefully to our kids
and we listen to their families they will tell us what’s going to work for them. It’s not that they haven’t said this
before to others, it’s just that we are being very intentional about hearing that message. We then work alongside them
to turn that into an action. We show that we’ve heard them”,
Wesley Community Action provides Te Waka Kotahi, a foster care programme contracted by the Ministry of Social
Development.
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