Berry Street Web Docs Berry Street Public Policy and Advocacy Agenda | Page 5

Key Areas of Advocacy and Action
• New models of foster and kinship care to ensure carers receive the financial and other supports
that will enable them to meet all the needs of the children and young people in their care
• Support for young people leaving care (to age 25) to prevent youth homelessness
• Development of an ’education and service passport’ for all children and young people who have been
within the OOHC system to ensure they have lifelong priority access to all forms of public education
and support services
• Development of therapeutic teaching and learning approaches that respond to and enhance the
learning capacity of children affected by trauma, abuse or neglect.

Two Ways Together - Supporting Aboriginal families and children
Currently Aboriginal families and children experience significantly higher levels of poverty,
homelessness, chronic disease unemployment and as a consequence significantly reduced lifeexpectancy. These issues and the inter-generational trauma from the widespread separation of
Aboriginal children from their families are driving the over representation of Aboriginal children in
child protection.
Through dialogue with Aboriginal people Berry Street has come to a better understanding of the
harm of past policies of child and family separation. In 2006 this led us to apologise for this harm and
motivated us to advocate for the full development of Aboriginal community based services focused
on supporting Aboriginal families and caring for and protecting children. By pursuing an approach that
could be described as two ways together we will work with Aboriginal families and services, learn from
their experiences, share our experiences and build a better child welfare support system for all children.

Key Areas of Advocacy and Action
• Development and enhancement of holistic universal community based Aboriginal child and family
support services
• Support for Aboriginal early years services to develop, run and model best practice child
development programs built around Aboriginal child rearing practices
• Effective implementation of the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle, cultural support planning
and family based decision making in child protection
• Establishment of an Aboriginal children’s guardian position to drive child protection reforms that
redress the over representation of Aboriginal children in child protection

No Place for Violence
The prevalence of violence within our community is of increasing concern to Berry Street. There is
no place for violence in our community - not in our families or homes, not on our streets or in our
neighbourhoods, not in our workplace or services, on our sporting fields - and not in the lives of
our children.
Violence is seeping its way into the lives of children and young people through their exposure to violent
images in a variety of media. Normalising violence and portraying violence as the means to resolve
issues undermines future relationships and erodes social cohesion. Racial violence and violence
perpetrated against women and children are of particular concern to Berry Street. As a community
we are failing boys and young men by not showing them non-violent ways to deal with the conflicts and
stress that inevitably form part of every human life. Strong male role models that reject violence are all
too often missing from the lives of young boys. Equally we fail girls and women if we don’t show them
that violence perpetrated against them in their family, their networks or community is not acceptable
and not something they should ever endure.
Through our local services we see first-hand that family violence is at the heart of most child protection
cases. We see the trauma it creates and the harm it does to children. We see women repeatedly
being harmed and victimised through family violence and then neglected by inadequate legal and
service responses. We know that the trauma of this violence can cause lifelong damage and create
intergenerational cycles of violence. There is no place for violence and Berry Street is committed to
using our influence to take a stand against violence in all areas of our work.