Covid-19 Community Foster Care Response

You will hopefully have seen a couple of video messages from me and Christina Saltmarsh regarding Covid-19.  Firstly, I want to thank everyone for their courage, tenacity and positive response to these new challenges, you truly make up a great community. I wanted to clarify a few key things briefly here:

- Communication and Support are key to how we all respond and problem solve.  We are therefore increasing Supervision and Support Groups, but these will be held over a video call platform that suits and is effective.  We want our support to be tailored to your needs, so tell us what you need.

- It is even more critical that with careful risk assessment, we continue to work on our mission and to continue to enable children to live in loving safe families.  We will continue to make new placements carefully considering the risks with all parties, we will continue to recruit new foster carers.

- We are rolling out the use of Zoom (video calling) across the org as this seems a very flexible platform.  We will use this for training, support group, therapeutic support group and supervision.

- Christina Saltmarsh and Victoria Blackwell (Child and Adult Psychotherapists) will be providing a weekly Group Therapeutic support session open to all carers North and South on Zoom.  Please try and prioritise these, as they are a great forum to get support.

- Our Support Worker Team will be making arrangements to speak to all children and young people in our care on a regular basis.  The support workers will talk with you first about the best way to facilitate these discussions, but they should enable the child to have a private conversation with the CFC Support Worker.  The purpose will be four fold: Support their Emotional Wellbeing, reinforce messages of safety and duty at this time, undertake activities, and promote online group activities that the support workers will be hosting.

- We have reviewed and tested our contingency working arrangements and have high confidence in our systems including payment operating normally, despite all staff being home based. 

With all good wishes for Easter,

- Mark Kingston, CEO