Now Manager of Centacare's Kimberley operation, Michael King's road to maturity and leadership was a rocky and remarkable one. His reflections on the impacts of out of home care on his journey through childhood and adolescence into adulthood provide a personal perspective for discussions about individualised approaches to out of home care.

 

 

 

Michael will share his personal experience of out of home care, as one of three speakers at the Alliance for Children At Risk's Breakfast Forum on person centred care and individual funding.

Michael was born in August of 1962 and, with his seven brothers and sisters, became an open case with the then Department for Community Welfare in November 1963. From that date, he never again lived with his mum and dad. Over the next 14 years, Michael spent more than seven years in eight different government and religious institutions, and had more than 12 different foster placements.

In 1975, Michael became the youngest child in WA to be placed in locked care and spent the longest period of time in Hillstone Boys Home. In 1978, he ran away from the Department and went to live in northern Australia and only returned to WA and locked care in 1980.

The lessons Michael learnt meant that at the age of 18 he transitioned straight to the adult custodial system and spent the next five years going in and out of WA prisons. According to Michael, life was pretty tough and he was unemployed for long periods.

In 1991, Michael decided that he needed an education and worked hard to gain university entrance. He commenced an undergraduate degree at Murdoch University in 1993 and in 1995 started volunteering with the then Department of Family and Children's Services in their Youth Activities Program at the Keith Main Youth Camp in Whiteman Park.

Since 1995, Michael has largely worked in social service roles. He has held senior positions in local government and non-government organisations and currently runs a medium-sized social support agency in Broome for Centacare.He has a good knowledge of support models for a range of service types and has worked in youth services for than 10 years. While a manager at AccordWest, Michael played a lead role in securing a significant level of out of home care funding from the then Department for Child Protection.

With this background, seeing out of home care from both sides -- as service recipient and provider -- he has a valuable contribution to make to discussions about service support models.

Please join us to hear what Michael has to say, along with:

• David Gilchrist, Director of Curtin University's Not-for-profit Initiative, who has experience setting up structures for individual funding and will look at what organisations have to do to get ready for it.
• Julie Waylen, State Manager NDS, who will consider how we can apply the models of person centred care and individual funding from other sectors in out of home care.  

Across these three speakers, the panel will address questions like:

• Why should we have person centred care and individual funding in out of home care? What are the benefits?
• How can person centred care and individual funding work together? How can they work separately?
• What might the models look like in out of home care?

This forum is an important step in building understanding in our sector of this way of working.

• Wednesday 26 November 2014
• 7.00 am for 7.30 am prompt start (to 9.00 am finish)
• At the University Club, UWA
• Tickets $90 each, includes breakfast

More details           Booking form (145 kb).

• < Prev
• Next >