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Using Time Wisely

Presented by Kevin Campbell

19 Dec 2016

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Using Time Wisely: The Journey to a Safe, Healthy and Hope-filled Response to Child Maltreatment

Keynote Address by Kevin Campbell

November 3 2016

Sydney Australia

Kevin Campbell, the developer of the Family Finding approach delivered a keynote address ‘Using Time Wisely’ to a conference of 240 senior leaders of Family and Children’s Services (FACS) in New South Wales (NSW), Australia in November 2016. The invitation to Kevin to speak at this conference arose because FACS is seeking to implement Family Finding to address the increasing numbers of NSW children particularly aboriginal children being taken into care for increasingly longer periods.

Andrew Turnell joined Kevin in NSW during that week while he was working with FACS so that Kevin and Andrew could continue their efforts to build their collaboration and to integrate the Signs of Safety and Family Finding approaches. Andrew assisted Kevin in preparing this keynote presentation.

In Andrew’s view this talk stands as the most transformative and far reaching presentation he has heard during his career in child protection.

Kevin calls for a complete transformation of exclusionary ‘casework as usual’ professionalised approach to children’s services that disempowers, parents and everyone naturally connected to children and frequently leaves children more damaged following professional intervention. Kevin speaks of how dehumanising and dispiriting this approach is for families, and also for professionals.

After summarising the problems Kevin spells out his vision of a truly participatory and facilitative child protection approach saying ‘safety without healing is temporary so a total focus on healing is urgent and essential in re-visioning our work’.

Kevin underpins his presentation with the latest findings from molecular biology, specifically genome and epigenome research that enables us to both understand and track markers of human health and wellbeing in two week intervals. This research has the potential to transform how we assess whether our practice is constructively or adversely affecting the health and emotional wellbeing of the children we work with in close to real-time through the life of our involvement. The epigenome work also provides the opportunity for us to identify if people staffing child protection systems are becoming healthier or more unhealthy working within the system. This could completely transform how we think about meaningful measures in children’s services.

This presentation will make you think deeply about our child protection systems and how we go about transforming them.