Who is The Tribe Project, Really? 🤨

As you know, we’re not a fostering support agency. We partner with the best of the best, the cream of the crop, and those agencies do an amazing job supporting carers (and kids!!) We are your link to these agencies. We’re the bridge that helps you get to the right place, the right agency, for the right placement. So far though, the only people you might recognise as the ‘we’ in Tribe is Mason and Mel, our co-founders. It's high time with introduce to the other brilliant people on our team.

What makes us unique here at Tribe is that 75% of our team falls into one of three categories – lived experience in care; a professional in the care system; or a foster carer (past or present). Introducing Laura - who is both a foster carer AND a professional in the care system.

Hi, I’m Laura. Professionally, I worked in Corrections from the time was 18 years old and specialised in working with sex offenders, violent offenders and other high risk or highly complex men. I've worked in prisons and parole offices. I've worked with young offenders. In my experience, in the middle of the worst things most of these people do, is pain and difficult childhoods and trauma. People are never born bad. And even people who have done bad things are not bad people. I believe everyone deserves a second chance and a lot of people deserve a lot more chances than that.

Currently, I work for a child protection consultancy for the past two years, assessing and training foster carers and staff who support those foster carers. I hold formal qualifications of a Bachelor of Human Services and started learning Auslan last year. I have a Cert II and it's a personal goal of mine to be a qualified Auslan interpreter.

I play netball and I coach my son's netball team of 8-9 year olds. I am the coach who is overly enthusiastic on the sideline every Saturday and most games come away without a voice. I also bribe the kids with lollies every game and training so that they like me and listen - some people might call it bribery; others might call is ‘positive reinforcement for good behaviour. 😝 Our goal is to have fun and be good humans and if we learn netball along the way, it is a bonus!

I have also been a foster carer since 2013. I’ve provided all types of foster care; emergency, respite, short and long term. Kin and general. Formal and informal. I've also been a part of a carer couple and a solo carer now so I feel like I've managed to tick just about every box there! Foster care seemed hard and scary before I actually did it. I had thought about it for years before taking the step to become one, but never seriously, as I thought only super-humans are foster carers. Turns out foster carers are really boring, normal people like me, and none of it was as hard as I thought it was going to be at the start.

I grew up in a traditional nuclear family; Mum, Dad, three kids and a dog. I respect and value that kind of family but I have found magic and incredible love within the unconventional family I have created. I have anywhere between 3 to 5 children in my home any one day. I actually started fostering first, before having three children with my husband through embryo adoption, and I fostered throughout my pregnancies and having babies and beyond.

I’m honest, fostering can have more challenges and I am very tired, a lot! but these challenges bring joy and curiosity and chances to grow as a human and as a family.

Honesty, once you hit 3 kids in the house, you don't really notice or stress when there are more. You put some good systems in place and everything just kind of works, e.g. my kids all have a colour for everything from plates and cups to towels and gumboots to water bottles and lunchboxes. There is no fighting because everyone knows their colour and respects the other kids’ colours. And it also helps me know who to rouse on for leaving their dishes on the table or muddy boots in the hallway. Even my two year old has the system down pat. He is yellow and if offered jelly beans he will automatically pick out the yellow ones. Very effective :)

4 of the 5 kids are in my forever legal care but one of my forever kids has bio family who love and adore him and we are committed to working together long term so he has stability but also a bio family connection. It has been weird and hard and awkward at times but it is what is best for the little one, and over many years, bio family and I have built a mutual respect.

You don't feel any different about kids you gave birth to or who came into your family in another way. I worried about that when I was pregnant for the first time. We already had a foster child with us and I worried I would love him less when the baby came. I didn't. It was like any parent. Your heart grows and makes more space for the children you bring into your family. A lot of worries I've had as a foster carer were just normal parent worries…..Should he be eating more? Am i doing a good enough job?

My favourite quote is the Urie Bronfenbrenner one, “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.” I think that is what foster carers should be at their core; prepared to be irrationally crazy for a child in their care. Everyone else in the system has to answer to governments and managers and legislation and policy. Everyone else gets to go home at 5pm. Everyone else can just quit and move on and be replaced so easily. To everyone else, the kid is a file or a case number or a client. Foster carers have accountability too, but they also have to be the ones to look in the eyes of the kids at night as they tuck them into bed and they have to know that they are prepared to battle for this kid to have the best life possible. They are the ones who see the kid as the human and know their favourite colour is pink that day but was orange yesterday and that they won’t eat bananas. Or know the name of their best friend at school, who was different to the one they had last week. And that they love playing tennis but they are actually terrible at it. The foster carer has to be the one to remind everyone else of the humanity of the child.

It may seem like we’re asking you to be superhuman or do something incredibly brave, but we’re not. We are just asking for you to be the one who grows to become crazy for the child in your care, for you to be their champion, to be their advocate, to be their person who has their back… That can be as their respite carer, their occasional carer, their emergency carer, or their permanent, full time carer. If I can do it, anyone can!

Take the pre-screen quiz to find out if you can be that person for a child in care today.