Three Children And A Rabbit: The BFANI Story

In this our 45th anniversary year, we uncover BFANI's origins story and meet the person who is responsible for getting us started. 

Lynda Wilson's journey from a senior social worker in 1978 to the founder of Barnardo's Fostering in Northern Ireland is a testament to her passion and innovation in child welfare. A dissatisfaction with the existing system, and a poignant story of a young boy looking for a suitable home, sparked the first professional foster care project in the region, Barnardo's Fostering NI. Lynda reflects back on her career, the families, the children...and the rabbit...who found their way to her office.

Helen Browne, the head of Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption NI today joins us to shed light on the current challenges and hopes in Northern Ireland's fostering landscape. We discuss how fee-paying fostering has evolved from a novel concept to a crucial support mechanism. And we explore the unprecedented need for foster carers and the challenges we face in our ongoing quest to support children and young people.

Learn more about fostering and adoption with Barnardo’s:
https://www.barnardos.org.uk/get-support/fostering-and-adoption

To learn more about fostering and adoption in NI, visit our Linktr.ee:
https://linktr.ee/barnardosfosteringni

To ask a question, give us some feedback or make a topic request, email us at:
BFANI@barnardos.org.uk

Foster belonging with us!

Chapters

• 0:03 Where It All Began with Lynda Wilson
• 19:05 Building Trust and Openess
• 25:19 Acceptance and Resilience
• 34:26 Challenges and Hopes Today with Helen Browne

Transcript

Ness: 0:03

Welcome to the Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption Northern Ireland podcast. Each episode we will meet families and team members from right across our fostering and adoption services. We're aiming to get behind the scenes so we can learn more about what it's really years since Barnardo's fostering started. I'm wondering if I can take you down memory lane a bit and just tell me what made you start Barnardo's fostering. I'm meeting with Linda Wilson, the founder of Barnardo's fostering, here in NI.

Lynda: 0:45

My memory of starting the service is quite a personal one because it was a big part of my journey in childcare and in 1978, I was working as a senior social worker team leader in South Belfast. So I had two social work teams and a social work assistant team and I covered Togmona, Tate's Avenue, The Village, The Markets, infamous Annandale flats, all areas of high deprivation, big issues of safeguarding and the impact of conflict. And I was in social work to make a difference in children's lives. And the last thing on my mind was ever moving to the voluntary sector and so, but there were a number of events that took me to a point where I thought I'm working with great people, great managers, great social workers, but this system is not making a difference in children's lives. So I want to go somewhere where I can actually contribute. You know something more positive and that is going to be effective.

Lynda: 2:05

And so in 1978, Barnardo's had the opportunity to start the first professional foster care project in Northern Ireland. It came about because the M2 was being built and the I think it was the Department of the Environment claimed the land where we had a large children's home. So the children's home needed to be knocked down and we had some very visionary leadership at that stage Mary Johnson and Roger Singleton in London and Roger Singleton in London and they had seen these professional fostering services in England and they thought, well, here's an opportunity for us to do something in Northern Ireland. So they initiated it. So my kind of you know desire to do something a bit more positive and experimental and the opportunity Barnardo's coming up with that just happened to coincide.

Lynda: 3:11

The plan. The plan was that they would set up a residential service which was a parent unit, three satellite units and then this little fostering project on the side. We were all supposed to be some kind of you know cluster, but we got started first because we needed to decant the big children's home, um, and we we took off and so we were made you know service in our in our own right. But there were a series of events where I really felt I was letting children down and that made me decide I wanted to make the move and actually set up something what can you tell me a bit more about that, about that?

Lynda: 4:02

probably probably three, two or three events. Um, one was a young man. I was 15, 16 and he was in Concora and he went on the run. He was in care to social services. He went on the run, phoned in one day to speak to his social worker, who wasn't there, and I happened to take the call and he was very clear he could not face coming in off the run if there was any chance of him going back into residential care or custody. He was very afraid and he said to me there's a woman in Tugmona. 'She was my grandmother's home help before she died and she was very good to me and she's in her 50s. I think she might take me as a kind of lodger, um, but she's a proper kind of lady and she goes to church. So she won't take me if social services don't agree. And do you think you could arrange that?" So this lady was in her 50s, single lady. He was 16. Uh, that kind of arrangement was just not made, um, and I managed again. I had a very, very um visionary principal and I'm after at the end of six weeks. I had the arrangements in place and he went to her and we paid her some kind of boarding out allowance and I thought, well, you know, if you can do that for in response to that specific child and his wishes, you can do it. You know you can do it for for other people. So that was my first and I actually used that at my interview because they asked me do you think there's any child who's unfasterable? And I said, well, let me tell you about this boy. I said you wouldn't have thought it, but you know he's placed and he's doing well. So that was one experience.

Lynda: 6:14

The second one really probably had to do with yellow dockets and pink dockets and pink dockets. The police decided they were going to be more innovative and diversionary in dealing with young offenders, the younger ones, the 13, 14-year-olds. So if they cautioned a young person, they would send a yellow docket to the local team leader, and most of my yellow dockets came from Allendale Flats. So the yellow docket would arrive and I would look at it and there was a name on it and I wouldn't recognise it. I might recognise the family name and, to be perfectly honest, I didn't know what to do with it because I didn't have a service for that, I didn't have staff for that, so I used to put them in an in tray on the right hand side of my desk and then you got three yellow dockets. So when it reached three, I used to paperclip them together and then you knew that the next thing is you would get a pink one. So when the pink one arrived, I still hadn't a clue what to do with it. So I paper clipped the yellow ones to the pink one, put them together and put them on the left hand side of the desk, thinking, well, you know, I know that child is now probably going to court. I don't know, I don't know what we do about that. I don't know. I don't know what what we do about that.

Lynda: 7:50

Um, and around that time I was allocated a male social worker, and I think before he even arrived. Now, a male social worker at that stage was quite unusual. So I before, even before he arrived, I bought him a football and I said to him now, paul, this is what I want you to do. I want you to stand outside Annadale Flats on that big green bit and I want you to kick that football around until you attract young boys. And then, when you look back on it and you think, my goodness, what a risky thing to do. But Paul, probably wanting to get through his placement, kicked the football around and within three days you know two, three days we had a five-a-side football team plus a few spares. So we entered them in the probation league five-a-side league.

Lynda: 8:42

And so every Thursday night we were transporting to various matches and the boys started coming into the office looking for Paul you know they can't come to us. So they asked could they have a strip? They wanted a strip and they wanted to call themselves the Annadale Striders. So I needed six strips. At that stage I could authorise four pounds and only for food. So I went to my assistant director and asked for the money for six football strips and she said I needed to do six family circumstances reports and it would have to go up the line and they'd let me know in a week or two. So I bought the strips myself and thought do you know? There's no kind of solutions, focused stuff going on here.

Lynda: 9:50

I suppose the third thing I say there are many, but the third thing involved three children and a rabbit. At that point in time, because of the rent and rate strikes in Northern Ireland, they were withholding government, withholding family allowance as it was then, and sometimes that was the only money the women actually got in their hands. So it wasn't unusual, especially on a Friday afternoon, for people to arrive up and threaten to dump their children into the office, and normally you could sort it out with a food voucher or some kind of response. But this Friday a woman came, left three children and a rabbit in the waiting room and then walked from Lower Crescent to her GP on the Ormer Road, signed herself into Purdageburn and I was left with three children and a rabbit. So I found myself around six o'clock going down through the yellow pages looking for anywhere that might accommodate them and I thought you have more chance of accommodating that rabbit than you do those children. If the worst comes to the worst, you can take the rabbit home, but you can't take the children home. So I think the three children and the rabbit were the final straw.

Lynda: 11:24

I just thought there has to be. You know I'm working with good people, very motivated people, but the system is not working. So it was a big jump. It was a big jump to go to the voluntary sector. You know again interview, they said to me. You do realise, you know the insecurity of funding in the voluntary sector. We can't promise your job's secure from one year to the next. But my plan was to go for five years, set that work up and then leave. And of course you know I stayed over 40 and was directed for 32. And so it was a great I mean, it was an absolutely fantastic opportunity to bring about change.

Ness: 12:20

Can you say something about those amazing changes that you oversaw during that time that set up? So you had this situation where you had a children's home that was destroyed to make way for the M2. So you had an immediate crisis, which is a whole group of children I don't know how many children are we talking here that you had to find homes for walking here that you had to find homes for.

Lynda: 12:50

so I, my first step was really because there was time, that you know. We had time. We had probably about a year to bring that change about and the really sad thing was that those children probably were about 20 of them in total Not all of them were going to go into foster care, not all of them wanted foster care and a lot of them had been brought up in residential care. Some of the children in Macedon had actually been in our baby home in Ballycastle so they'd gone in as babies. They transferred to Macedon when they were six or seven so they'd been brought up in an institution and they were institutionalized.

Lynda: 13:40

So my, my first job was to really get to know those children and get to know what their wishes were and to help them understand you know what Barnardo's was planning and give them some agency in it, you know, give them some choice. And some of them chose not to go. And I mean I would still, before I left Barnardos, have had contact with quite a few of those young people now in their 40s, 50s and you know some of them said look, you know, I could see what you were trying to do. I just couldn't, I just couldn't bring myself to do it and I wish I had you know. So they needed to have an understanding and a knowledge of they had some choice in the matter and you know, for for I mean, we're whole families.

Lynda: 14:48

There's one family of five and some of them went into foster care, some of them didn't, so children were helped. To make individual decisions about that had to get to know the staff as well. You knew which staff were rooting for kids. So that was something. After I decanted Nasset and I decanted Ballycastle and then I decanted Carrickfoyle, closed out those three, and you were always looking when you were going in is there somebody here who's really rooting for this child? Is there somebody here who really knows them? Because if you could see any kind of attachment, you knew you could make that work in a foster care situation as well.

Ness: 15:48

So how did you find your first families?

Lynda: 15:51

How did we find the first foster carers? We advertised and I did radio interviews and newspaper articles and I was on a very fast learning curve because I was trying to explain to journalists that you know these children would have challenges. You know that they had been through some terrible times and they might steal they might you know there might be bedwetting trauma.

Lynda: 16:43

So I was trying to explain to journalists this is what we're talking about. So the first article in the Belfast Telegraph said and Mrs Chapman, because I was Mrs Chapman. Mrs Chapman said these children are petty thievers and bedwetters. And I had to go into that children's home that day, knowing that the staff and the children had probably seen that. Oh, I made so many mistakes and, you know, learned fast, had to learn fast. And also social services were the health and social care trusts were absolutely appalled at the idea that anybody would pay foster carers and I think, only the fact that we already had their children in residential care. I don't think social services didn't choose to refer these children into this scheme. We said look, we're going to decant and we're going to decant some into residential and some into foster care. So I don't think they really fully appreciated. And after about a couple of years they hold on a minute. Do you mean to say we've agreed to professional fostering?

Ness: 18:14

yes, you have so you have children in residential and they need to go somewhere. They need to go somewhere and you were having to find you were being child led. You were trying to give as much agency as you could and some children really didn't want to go into foster care, but where it was appropriate and possible you were then trying to find foster carers to come forward and step up and take these children. Yes, so it must have been quite a difficult trying to understand the, the shape of the organization that you were now in charge of. It must have taken a while for it to fully form in your head, apart from anything else, yes, and and you know, bernardo's, it's a bit like where I'm working now it it had.

Lynda: 19:05

Although there was fantastic innovation starting to happen, it had developed organically. So people had been there a long time and they did things in a certain way. I mean, for example, one of the early things I initiated was I opened the files to foster carers so they could read their own files, and that caused mayhem because dreadful things have been said and language had been used.

Ness: 19:41

It wasn't necessarily complimentary you know what made you, what made you, what inspired you to do that, make that decision well.

Lynda: 19:48

I thought you know that this has to be a team. You know these foster parents and us are going to come together to work together. You know we have to. You know there has to be an openness and an honesty. You know we can't be in that kind of superior position. It you know there has to be a level of honesty If we're going to expect honesty from them in how they're coping or not coping so we can work with it. We can't have these closed files.

Lynda: 20:20

And also I'd had the benefit of I mean, bernard's were really good at the beginning because they sent me off to England.

Lynda: 20:25

I had just got married the week before and they sent me off to England for eight weeks to um visit all these projects, all these you know, you know um special fostering projects that were that started in the south of England, at Coventry and um, and I mean people who were coming into these projects were not traditional foster carers. Some of them were quite eccentric and, you know, had maybe had colourful lives themselves and you know, probably if you go back through traditional fostering you knows 60s files it would set things like. You know, mr and Mrs, whatever are, they go to church and they've got a decent income and their doctor says they're nice people. The people I was meeting in England wouldn't necessarily have fitted that mould. They maybe had, as I say, they'd had challenges and adversities in their own life and had learned from them and were willing to understand and accommodate that children would also have that they were motivated from their own resilience and experiences and were driven to help other children who had a similar fate.

Lynda: 21:51

Yeah, and also I mean I think you know that bit of professionalising the role was important because there were people around who wanted to work with children, didn't necessarily want to go into a more formal setting but still want to be paid for it, and they weren't under any illusion or delusion that this was going to be love at first sight and it was all going to be happy, happy that they were going to do their absolute best for these children.

Ness: 22:32

You were talking about how some of the babies I mean some of those children were literally born and taken straight into residential care and were institutionalized. Did you have any experiences of children who had that institutionalized way of being but who managed to overcome that in a foster home.

Lynda: 22:53

Yes, yeah, the Ballycastle babies. I decanted I hate that word actually. I decanted Ballycastle after Macedon and I don't know if you I don't think you'd have been around this whenever Ballycastle was still owned by Barnardo's, but it was, it's like. You know, it's like something on the moors in Yorkshire, you know, but it's on the corner in Ballycastle, but great, big old house with the plumbing on the inside of the wall, on the outside of the walls, you know one of those old buildings with the plumbings. They had a milk kitchen. So you know, babies would be brought down to the milk kitchen to be fed at night and all that kind of carry on. But all the staff in Ballycastle Children's Home were local people. Quite a lot of them were married to each other and had families, so there was a kind of inside-outside community feeling for those children and the community and school owned the children, the staff Ballycastle was small enough to sort of incorporate them.

Lynda: 24:14

I placed quite a few children who'd come in, some who'd gone on to Macedon, some who were still in Ballycastle. I remember one wee boy and I remember sitting in the garden with him in Ballycastle Centre where do you think you're going to go whenever we're starting to close Ballycastle? What's your plans? And he pointed to the old people's home across the road and he said well, linda, I'd probably move over there now. He was a gorgeous child, just gorgeous child, very institutionalized, very old-fashioned. Again, that Ballycastle upbringing had been quite old-fashioned. So I placed him when he moved and he and I placed him with a family who were really quite eccentric but through other and chaotic.

Ness: 25:13

But he did really well, really, really, really really well, you said something just now, and you've said it a couple of times, about sometimes recognising eccentricity within some of the foster carers Within the scheme of eccentricity, what were the qualities that you?

Lynda: 25:39

recognised in those foster carers, I think, an acceptance of humanness and not expecting either of themselves or children, young people, perfection, you know. Not having a kind of this is the way it should be, you know, and a sort of a curiosity, an openness. I mean, I don't know. If you know, ness, I inherited my three nephews and nieces through the death of my brother and sister-in-law.

Ness: 26:22

Yeah.

Lynda: 26:22

I mean, you know, if you looked at us as a textbook couple, we were perfection. You know, a GP and social worker, it was terrible, do you know what I mean? And I had. I had to learn that, not to expect perfection. You know that there were times I really didn't like them, for times they really did not like me, um, but I think that sort of just not having really set ideas about things, um having you know, being able just to have things getting by and not and not always being, you know, overly successful or perfect yeah

Ness: 27:09

yeah, which still stands true today, doesn't it? I mean, these are exactly, I don't know. We look for. We look for resilience, do you know?

Lynda: 27:17

look for perfection, we look for people who are open, curious, I mean I like I always used to like, as a social worker, going into a house to do an adoption assessment. You know where there was some level of disruption. You know there was a was some level of disruption. You know there was a few biscuits on the floor. Do you know what I mean? Things weren't overly rigid, yeah. And also, I think you're also looking for people who will and this was a big thing for me help seeking behaviour. I think help seeking behaviour is absolutely critical. People who can say, look, I'm not coping, this isn't. You know, I'm beyond myself here. Yeah, I need, I just need to get this off my chest, not kind of I should have the answers, I should be good at this. But working with you, you know working, I mean I hear I hear bernardo's fostering staff say that now, that kind of co-working, absolutely very much so yeah, is you know people not taking themselves too seriously?

Ness: 28:33

yeah, I think that's. That's a good rule of thumb in life, isn't it? And Linda, how long were you with Barnardo's? All in all, you left almost about within the year that I joined. I think yeah, was that.

Lynda: 28:47

I started I must have been Barnardo's about 40 years, but I didn't. I intended to say five. I thought I'll do the decent thing. You know that'll be a good, that'll be a good commitment. Five years and I was project leader for fostering for about eight or nine and then I did a management course and I came back and I became an AD. And I was an AD for six months and then I became director just in my mid-30s, which was really unusual. Uh, there was only one other female director. She was was away at the time. So there was me and 13 men in that team and I remember going whenever the director was leaving.

Lynda: 29:42

I remember going everywhere and saying to people would you not apply for the director's job? Would you not apply? And something happened to every single person that I approached. They either had a heart attack or something, you know, they got another job or something happened. So and I was, we have a chance here, you know, to really do something with this organisation and I didn't think that the current acting director at the time had that vision. So I went to the then director and I said to him Don look, do you think if I applied to be a caretaker till they got somebody or they widened the field that they would think about that. You know, I've only been an assistant director six months and I don't want to be director, you know. But do you think they'd look at a caretaker? Think they'd look at a caretaker?

Lynda: 30:49

So he contacted the then director in London, mike Jarman, and Mike phoned me that night and he said to me I didn't know him, I'd never met him. He said to me look, linda, you either want to be director or you don't. And I thought, well, that is very cheeky. And so I said to him well, I do, I do so. I applied and I mean, it was a real, it was a big risk. They took, you know, a young director in their mid-30s. Not these days it wouldn't be considered, but in those days it was, yeah, amazing. And yes, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't actually sit, I couldn't go into my office for nearly 10 days. Uh, because, so I'd wandered around. I sat in the tea room and I wandered around and then eventually the PA said to me Linda, you will have to come in here and sit down. You will have to sit behind that desk because that is your desk that's incredible, but you did sit behind that desk.

Ness: 32:08

Well, I wandered around more than I sat behind the desk, which is, you did sit behind that desk and you did oversee Barnardo's NI but the, the um fostering project was an amazing seedbed for me because I knew that you could.

Lynda: 32:27

You could start things. You know you could make things happen. You know it wasn't it wasn't like social services where we've always done it this way, so we'll just keep doing it. You could actually say is there another way? Is there, is there something that would work? Um, and I mean, when I closed, just as I came in, we separated from the Republic.

Lynda: 32:55

So I was left with, I think, five services in the north and I closed two. So I was left with about three or four services and I don't know how I managed it, but I found about 80,000. And I went to the director of the Eastern Board and I said to him look, hugh, I've got 80,000. And if you can come up with money, I will put my 80,000 alongside yours and what would be the top of your list that you really need for development. And he came up with two things and that got us moving. And then the next thing we did was we decanted the children out of the long stay hospital in Armagh Tarhill children with disabilities. We brought eight of them out. They'd been in hospital most of their lives. So you knew you could do things, so that was.

Ness: 34:04

Amazing. You thought you'd be there for five years. You thought you'd be around for five years and you ended up being there for 40 that's incredible, yeah but what of the Barnardo's fostering service here in Northern Ireland today?

Ness: 34:26

Helen Brown is the head of Barnardo's fostering in Northern Ireland today and we got a chance to catch up to have a look at what the climate is like now. Hi, Helen, Hi hi Vanessa. So I was speaking to Lynda Wilson last week who was telling me all about how fostering started here in Northern Ireland. It's a great story and I was just wondering what? What's the climate like now? You've been actually the head of fostering for well, I've been here eight years, so you must have been close to ten, yeah, almost nine actually.

Helen: 35:02

So you must have come in on the back of of my appointment. I must have come in on the back of my appointment. Well, I've been in fostering almost 30 years, but with Barnardo's, as you say, approaching the 10 years, and I did work for Barnardo's in a project about 20 years ago. So I had a very strong connection and a very strong interest in Barnardo's throughout my, my my career in fostering. So, um, feel like in many ways I've come home um coming to Barnardo's. So it's been. It's been a really um enjoyable uh last nine years.

Ness: 35:48

What is the fostering service like now, 45 years later?

Helen: 35:53

Well, as Lynda will have explained, she was so innovative 25 years ago because she set up the first fee-paying fostering service.

Helen: 36:14

So Barnardo's were pioneers in many ways. So she was attracting people who saw it as an alternative to other caring occupations, so they were able to perhaps stay at home and maybe raise their own children, or at the back of raising their own children, they then started to foster. So it was such a great opportunity for those kinds of, you know, people that were had that, who were predisposed to that kind of lifestyle. But now fee paying exists not only in the independent sector but also in trusts. We set our own rates around that, but they are, by and large, competitive and they're, um, I think, facilitate people who would like to be to have that work home lifestyle where they can maybe work part-time or work um, uh, you know, have some kind of work, be it home-based work, um whether that's something that complements fostering or indeed they are just home fostering. Back then, um, there was this kind of uh, huge, uh excitement around the how fee paying was introduced. I think now it's accepted as part of, you know, a necessary support for anyone entering fostering.

Ness: 38:03

To make it possible for them to foster in the first place. Yeah, what are the profile? Do you think of people who come forward to foster in the first place? Yeah, what? What are the profile do you think of people who come forward to foster now? I know I'm asking you a sort of how long is a piece of string question but. If there was. If there were common qualities, what, what might, what might they be?

Helen: 38:21

I know who we target and we, you know we try to target that that, uh, I'm not going to say middle age, but certainly people who have, um, maybe explored their their own careers or have jobs and quite stable in their life, whether that's through their jobs or home, and you know decisions around whether they're having children, not having children and, you know, are at a point in with maybe a young family that would maybe leave them quite, maybe a little bit too busy. So it's about people who can, through their assessment, be able to manage both, whatever caring responsibilities they may have in the home alongside fostering. And I suppose that's that in effect. You know we are attracting caring people, so it's no surprise that people with caring responsibilities will come forward. But often it becomes in a timing issue about what is the right time for them to step forward. And maybe we are saying to some people you might want to come back to us in a year or you might want to think about this a little bit down the line.

Helen: 40:00

But you know, certainly we have had fabulous carers over the years who have started fostering after their own children have left home. But of course, you know you're asking me to look back and think about fostering today, and this is in the back of COVID and the back of a global pandemic that changed lifestyles, changed how families operate. Who heard about hybrid working until we entered lockdown? And you know so the working from home has been a major challenge, I think, for fostering, because what it's, perhaps what I think it has done, is it has provided people who maybe, otherwise, were looking for something that would allow them to work from home. Something that would allow them to work from home, they, they may all now have that in their, in their other career, other work that they don't necessarily. Maybe you know, then, where they maybe would have gravitated to.

Ness: 41:20

Fostering that has not and is not happening, because that's interesting, helen, because I expected that sentence to end in. Hybrid working has made more people realize they could foster.

Helen: 41:33

I, I am I'm not certain about that because we, you know, what we know is that, uh, fostering, the numbers of people UK wide, has dropped since and, and significantly since covid. So we don't really know, we haven't really examined why we are seeing a downturn, um, in people coming forward, but I suspect it has to be about, um, some changes in lifestyle, um, or or a drive. You know there's also a cost of living crisis, so it could be that bit of both um but um, so it, we don't know. We don't really know what's what's happening. But one thing we do know is that the numbers, the challenges within fostering just grows each year and we have an unprecedented number of children in the care system.

Helen: 43:02

And you know we're definitely there is a capacity issue across all aspects of, you know, the trusts and the independence I mean. Another factor in this could be that children, adult children, are finding it hard to move to their first home. There's a shortage of housing. So if adult children remain at home, there's a shortage of housing. So if adult children remain at home, then there's a capacity issue within the average household where, if ordinarily they would have left home, creating space at home, spare bedrooms where the parents may have thought well, you know, we made pretty good parents, we could do this all over again for a child who needs a loving home. So I think that is potentially another factor, just that whole capacity issue and whether households can accommodate more children.

Ness: 44:13

There's a real set of challenges post-pandemic isn't there so? What you're saying is on top of hybrid working, there's a cost of living crisis and, as we all know, young adults are now living at home longer than they ever did and often are boomeranging back in their 20s because they can't afford to get on the housing ladder. So there's one challenge after the other which all the fostering service is not just our own, or having to face year um. What are your hopes for the 46th year and onwards?

Helen: 44:54

well, you know, I suppose, whilst I'm saying that there's a shortage, we we'd continue to grow and I suppose that's because and I I believe it's because we have good supports in place, we've high level training and when I think, when people have those supports, I think you always feel anything's possible. So I I believe that you know people contacting us will feel, you know, that we can't, we'll support them through a journey. I think we set high standards in Barnardo's, but not because of it's because we have children at the heart of everything we do. So it's about bringing people through that are good enough, that are good enough for the children that we know are in the care system, who have been so disadvantaged in life, who need the best care that can be provided. They need specialist care because of the trauma that they've suffered. So we have to set a high standard for those children. So my hope is that we can recruit more of those kinds of people, that more of those kinds of people step forward to bernardo's, that they'll receive high level support and we'll carefully match a child and ideally children with them. Because you know you ask me what my hopes are I'm passionate about keeping siblings together, so when people come forward to us, I'm always thinking have the capacity for more than one.

Helen: 46:51

Can they keep children who have suffered enough loss, keep them with their brother or sister through the care system, so that they have that continuity in life where they because these are children that have yes, they may have suffered the same hurt and pain and trauma, but they can also heal and repair together as well. When maybe those carers are no longer around, they've got an enduring relationship that will see them into adulthood and beyond Well, into adulthood and into, you know, the maturity that life brings. So I'm passionate about siblings, but also that working to people's strengths but also expanding on capacity where, where we can those sound like really really good goals and in light of her in our january campaign and part of our january campaign messages.

Ness: 47:59

You know you may have the skills already to foster. We are very keen to lean into the the skills and experiences that our foster carers bring to our service. And I suppose my last point would be the thing that always makes me hopeful is that our biggest recruitment tool is our own foster carers. The thing that is the biggest recruitment tool is word of mouth, so it's people meeting our foster carers. That often makes them go hang on a second. I could do that. So there must be some very positive experiences happening out in the real world that making people just pick up the phone or visit the website and and come and see us we had our dinner, Vanessa, do you remember it?

Helen: 48:43

you know, celebrating our 45 years, and you know we were. We challenged our existing foster carers to give. We give them a gift and ask them to pass on a gift to someone that they knew, someone that, because who's best at knowing you know, they know what it takes to be a foster carer, if you know, because they are one, and therefore, um, you imagine that they have like-minded friends or people that they can identify in the, in the, on the school run or at their Pilates class or at church. Um, that they might think. I think they've got it. You know, they've got what it takes and a little, you know, maybe just some encouragement Even. I suppose what we're really asking people is to pick up the phone and explore it with us, have a conversation, and it mightn't be the right time for you, but you can come back when it is the right time.

Ness: 49:53

Yes, we do have foster carers who did exactly that, don't we? Well, that's really great. Thank you so much for talking to me, Helen, today, and I'm really hoping that we get some great inquirers picking up that phone and contacting our website over this January and and beyond. Here's to the next 45 years. Thank you so much, thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks for listening to this episode of Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption NI podcast. To learn more about fostering and adoption with us, search for Barnardo's online or find the link in our program description. We love to hear from you your thoughts, questions or future topic requests. To do so, you can contact us at bfani at barnardo'sorguk. You will find our email address also in the show notes.