Great to speak with Neil from Home for Good at The Gathering 2024.
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And now I've got another guest in front of me from Home for Good, his name is Neil, I'm going to introduce him to you, so you can find out a little bit about him and what he's doing. Hello Neil. Hello. So you're here at The Gathering, you're representing Home for Good, let's just go to the Home for Good part, what exactly is that about, what is it trying to do? So in a nutshell, I guess Home for Good is wanting to inspire the church to consider fostering adoption and supported lodgings and inspire Christians to actually become those people. We believe the church is the answer, so this year there will be about 38,000 children who will come into the care system, that's one every 15 minutes, which is 104 each day. So the need is great. Yeah. So we're talking about adoption, we're talking about, you know, children who need a family, who need a home. So what exactly is it that you're doing? Are you connecting services with parents or are you vetting the parents? I mean, where about you sort of sitting in that whole thing of a child's taken away, putting to some sort of social care of some description, and then at some point you guys are going to come along and find a family, but how does that actually work? Yeah, good question, because one of the things I often fail to answer, but thankfully that people come and ask me, we're not an agency. So we've got this, I guess, unique position really, that we're not an agency, so we don't place children, we don't do any assessments or anything like that. That's all down to social services or an agency. Social workers do that, and we're not social workers. So but what we do is one of the things we do have is what we call an inquiry line, and anyone can phone up, we've got experienced people there, and no matter how small your inquiries, we will we will journey with you. So often people take take years to come to a decision on whether they are going to foster our adopted, and we just want to be helpful in part of that journey. And one of the other thing that we want to do is we want to support people as well. So we raise up support groups within different communities. So because one of the important things is it's not just enough to have people say, yes, I want to become a foster carer or an adopted, they need support after. And so we looked at forming and helping support groups. And one of the other things that I would say is our unique place is the church. We want to go to the church because we believe the church is ideal for this. You have people who could adopt, people who could foster, people who could offer supported large instant teenagers, and people to support those people as well. The church is the ideal place to go for us. So just dealing with some of the language I think for some people, you mentioned a fostering image and adoption. What would be the difference between those two? Because are they very different? Yes, they're different and I guess in a sense similar. So either way your children, sadly for one reason or another, have not been allowed to continue living with their with their parents. And so they come into the care system. Now initially what you're going to need is people to look after them straight away. So that would be foster care. And foster care can take on a number of different guises. So you can have short-term foster care, which is anything up to two years. And then you can have longer-term foster care, which is anything beyond two years. You can have respite fostering where perhaps it's just for a weekend or something like that. So that's fostering. So it's more of seeing as a temporary thing, but it's not always temporary because long-term can't be long-term. Then you get adoption where certain children will be, it will be deemed that the best route for them is adoption. And so we will look for adopters then. We've not passed home for good personally. But the plan will be adopted and now will be that the child will become legally the parents, the adopted child. So they would have all legal rights, parental control and that. With fostering, the foster care doesn't have parental rights. That's usually shared between the birth parents and the local authorities. So that's internet. Can I say something about supported lodgings? So supported lodgings for teenagers is sometimes it's called foster in light. And it's basically where the teenager can't live at home. And they go and live with supported lodgings hosts. And they're like a mentor in many ways. So they sort of like mentor the teenager. So you younger the same things like being at eight o'clock or whatever like that. It's generally more looser and free in that sense. So really what the work you're doing is just encouraging people to consider this initially and then to support them if they've actually gone through with that, to say, you know what, I've gone past it. Now I want to do this. But you don't take great off you go. Actually, there's support. So what sort of support do people get? We've never said, right, we're going to do this. How are you going to help us get through this? Yeah. Well, the biggest way. So I mentioned our inquiry line. We have, to give it is more proper name perhaps is an inquiry and family support department. So if anyone has any issues, if they're already fostering or if they're looking at it, then we can support. Sometimes that will mean that we signpost people and we'll tell people what's available to them because there are cases sometimes where people don't know what support is out there for them. And we can say, well, hey, try this here. And so that's one of the ways. So I was supporting guys. They're fabulous. One of the other ways is that we have support groups around the country. Usually a foster care or an adopter will think, yeah, we need a support group here for foster carers and adopters and they will set one up and they will then come to us and we will then look at putting this as a home for good support group where we can just advertise it in a sense. And we've also got many resources on the website, loads of resources, lots of stories, lots of helpful blogs and articles which will help people to navigate certain situations. So the support is quite varied, I guess, in our sense. If people want to find out more and they're thinking, do you know what maybe adoption, maybe this is something that I actually can do. There's a practical part that I could actually play here. And how do they find out more about your organization? I'm guessing there's a website. How do people find that? Yeah, so go to the website, which is homeforgood.org.uk. One of the things that we do is we have information evenings, they're all online, they last for about an hour to an hour and a half and no question is off the table and we will just be talking about what is fostering, what is adoption and answering people's questions and that. One of the other things that we have is what we call a foundation's course and the foundation's course is a six-week course and we tackle a number of issues. So one of them would be the issue of trauma. Another one is the church and there's various different topics that we had. The great thing about that is we have we have biblical teaching in it as well as breakout rooms where people almost form their own community over six weeks and people have said, "I've really got to know my breakout leader, breakout room leader and the people in my group as well." And you sort of discuss some of the questions that come up people and I've taken this course a number of times as in led here. I know I'm going to say this, but it is fabulous and the feedback that we get is brilliant. You know, people find it really, really helpful but you've gone through a really well thought-out process and for some people they'll say, "No for no." For other people they'll say, "Great, let's start the journey that I noticed." They would be two of their main ways and you know everything is on the website. So for the information sessions and the foundations, all the details are on the website and events. So if you want to know more about Home For Good, go for homeforgood.org.uk at Neil. Thank you for your time of sharing some of this. Did you know, Pure 24/7 Radio has a shop? Well, we do. You can buy merchandise while supporting the work that we do here. Simply head over to www.pure247radio.org/shop. That's www.pure247radio.org/shop. That's www.pure247radio.org/shop.
