Southern Downs CFC - GRATITUDE - Issue 17 - January 2022-2

Hello!
And welcome.
Happy New Year and welcome to the January issue of our monthly newsletter, Gratitude! Well, 2022 is well
underway, and what a start to the year it's been. I hope you and your families are all staying safe in the current
COVID-19 climate. We know being a carer is a tough job at the best of times, so appreciate that for many of you,
your role has been made even tougher with the rising number of COVID-19 infections in the community,
including in your families. Please know we are here to help, so be sure to reach out if you need additional support.
Thanks for your patience at the beginning of the year while we made changes to how we manage family
connections (contacts), home visits and departmental meetings during January. These changes have enabled us
to continue to provide critical statutory child protection services to children and families, but in a way that reduces
the further transmission of COVID-19. Our priorities will always be the health and wellbeing of the children and
young people we support, their families, along with the health and wellbeing of our amazing foster and kinship
carers and our hard-working staff.
The current COVID situation is a very timely reminder to ensure children and young people in care are vaccinated.
On page 7, we have reproduced a letter recently sent out by our Acting Chief Practitioner about children getting
vaccinated, including those children now aged 5—11 years.
This month we move to being a 'four practice team' office. With most of our new Child Safety Officer positions now
filled (yay), and with Rachel Doherty as our newly recruited permanent fourth Senior Team Leader, we transition
to our new team structure the week of 10th January 2022. Head to page 24 for our new and updated
organisational chart. And meet the newest members of our team—we introduce you to Amanda, Alicia, and Udur,
and share a little bit about them, and why they do what they do.
In the rest of this Issue:
we share an excellent resource from the Australian Childhood Foundation on why the words we use when we
talk about children and young people really do matter;
we invite our foster and kinship carers to our Open Day High Tea coming up in March;
we again share some excellent, FREE learning opportunities for carers coming up with the Evolve Toowoomba
team;
plus lots more!
Happy reading, and until next month...thanks for caring, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Shane Doré
My pronouns are He / Him and this is why they are important
Manager
Southern Downs Child and Family Centre