DR MANDY TRUONG: Welcome everyone to today’s webinar, ‘Supporting cultural needs: Working with culturally and logistically diverse children in out-of-home care’. My name is Mandy Truong, and I’m a member of the Child and Family Evidence and Evaluation team here at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

I would like to start by acknowledging the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations, the traditional owners of the lands in Naarm, Melbourne, where I am speaking to you from. I pay my respects to the traditional owners of Country throughout Australia, and recognise their continuing connections to lands and waters. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. I also acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening in today.

This week is National Child Protection Week and we’re partnering once again with the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, NAPCAN, to bring this webinar to you. This year’s theme is ‘Every conversation matters’, highlighting the importance of individuals, communities, and organisations participating in conversations that protect and uplift children and young people.

So before we dive into this conversation, I have a little housekeeping to do. There will be a live Q&A at the end of the webinar so please type your questions in via the questions box in the GoTo Webinar dashboard. This webinar is being recorded and the recording and transcripts will be available approximately two to three weeks after today. We have put together a list of related resources and readings and this is available in the Handout section of your GoTo Webinar control panel. There will also be a short feedback survey which will open up at the end of the webinar.

This webinar is on children in out-of-home care and includes someone sharing their living experience. Please take care while you’re listening, and if you require any assistance, there are resources available in the Handouts tab.

Today’s topic is about how practitioners, carers, and services can support the cultural needs of culturally and linguistically diverse, or CALD, children in out-of-home care. As cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity among the Australian population increases, the number of children from CALD backgrounds in out-of-home care is also likely to increase. And while out-of-home care policies recognise that children and young people have the right to grow up connected to their culture, family, and community, there is limited research and best practice knowledge on how to identify and address the needs of CALD children and their families.

Therefore the aim of this webinar is to share learnings from different perspectives on the experiences and needs of care experience children from CALD backgrounds to encourage a stronger focus on cultural needs and connections in the child protection system. This webinar will focus on non-Indigenous culturally and linguistically diverse children and families because we recognise that the experiences of First Nations children and families in relation to out-of-home care are unique and deserve to be covered separately.

Now, a quick note about the term ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’, or CALD. Other than it being a little bit of a tongue twister for me, we’re using the term CALD because it is the most commonly used term in Australia to describe people for racial and ethnic minority groups that are non-Indigenous. However, we do acknowledge that this is a contested and flawed term that can serve to homogenise and stereotype a large and diverse population of people. In this webinar we’re using the term in a broad sense to describe communities and families with diverse languages, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, traditions, and religions.

I’d like to recognise and acknowledge those who have living experience of out-of-home care, and those working tirelessly to support the wellbeing of children and young people who interact with the child protection system. This includes the three panellists joining me today. Their full bios can be found in the Handout section of the GoTo Webinar dashboard. I’d like to warmly welcome Professor Rebekah Grace, Kathy Karatasas, and Arabella Stravolemos. I welcome you all today, thank you for being with us.

Professor Rebekah Grace is the director of the Research Centre for Transforming early Education and Child Health at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the service and support needs of children and families who experience disadvantage and adversity, spanning disability, education, child development, and child protection.

Kathy Karatasas is a social worker working in early intervention, child protection, and out-of-home care services with government and non-government organisations. She’s also the founder and CEO of CulturalWorks, which works with agencies to elevate culturally responsive services to children from CALD backgrounds in care.

Kathy is joining us from London, which is quite early in the morning there, while she’s on a Churchill Fellowship exploring this topic internationally.

And last but not least, we have Arabella Stravolemos who is a graduate in social work and a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers. She also has experience with out-of-home care and has recently become a kinship carer. Thank you again for being with us today and spending your time having this important conversation.

Firstly, let’s discuss what we mean by culture. We often hear about the importance of connection to culture in the context of First Nations peoples, but less so for people from CALD backgrounds. Let’s start with you Arabella, how is culture experienced in your family, and how important is it?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: Well, I’m Greek and Italian, so culture is definitely very highlighted, and we have a very strong cultural connection and it’s practiced every day. Every day I have a cultural tie. Even when it comes down to the coffee in the morning, I have a Maganette, which is the Italian coffee.

When I had to reflect on culture, I thought about how widespread culture can be, and it’s intertwined into everything that we are and where we belong. So to me, it’s that sense of belonging, something that connects us to our family, our extended community, and it shapes who we are and how we perceive the world around us.

My background, as I said, I’m Greek and Italian. But within my sibling group, I have Māori, Aboriginal, and English. And when I grew up, I had family connection, I was fortunate enough to have that family connection, so their cultures became intertwined with who I am and how I perceive the world. I feel quite blessed to be able to see such diversity, but I do understand that’s not a norm in today’s mainstream society, and not many people have nine siblings. So I can safely say that I have a different lens on things.

With that, I think I see that within all of our sibling group there’s such a difference in our experience and how we are exposed to privilege, and that without this culture, this richness to who we are, we can feel that sense of loss. I can safely say for me I did feel that sense of loss with the system interventions.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Thanks very much Arabella, I like how you highlighted that it was a unique experience for you and your siblings. I’m also curious to understand how did you learn to talk about culture within your family, or was it something that was just a natural thing that happened?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: I wasn’t supported in this at all, it wasn’t something that was spoken about. Because I was with kin, my grandmother, my nonna, I think it was just assumed that I had the connection to culture. But I also didn’t know another part of myself, which was my Greek side, which I found out later on. No one helped me explore this, it was just expected that I would know or I was okay, so I just had to deal with the things as they came.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Yeah, that’s really important that sometimes when you’re growing up as a young person, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Now I’ll bring you into the conversation, Kathy. I understand that talking about culture can be quite tricky for some people, especially if you’re part of the dominant culture where it’s not talked about in a very explicit way, and sometimes practitioners can definitely sometimes find it challenging to understand and unpack culture. There might be a bit of a fear of saying the wrong thing, or even having a deep understanding of what it might mean for children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Can you tell me a bit more about this, and perhaps talk about the cultural framework that you’ve co-developed?

KATHY KARATASAS: Thanks Mandy. I think, as Arabella just mentioned, culture is really unique to individuals in terms of their background, and we over the years have realised how complex and unique it is. So the SELF cultural framework that has evolved over the last 15 years that I’ve developed with some colleagues, Ghassan Noujaim being one of them, really looked into a multicultural foster care service that I was involved in a number of years ago. And it unpacked that there were four common elements that we identified that are worth considering as practitioners.

One was around what does settlement mean for an individual child and family? Were their background one as a migrant, or one as a refugee, and how long have they acculturated to, or been living in, Australia, and what their settlement journey was like before and after? The questions around ethnicity, and language, and faith allow for some thinking about, and some conversations, with children and families around what this might mean for them. So it’s really about the opportunity to ask questions and understand what might be unique to a child and family.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s really interesting. Did you feel that part of people’s hesitation might be because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing?

KATHY KARATASAS: Yeah, yeah. And not knowing, that’s the other issue, that as you mentioned before culturally and linguistically diverse can be a homogenous label, so we may not know what are the details under that. As you referenced, there’s a lot of issues around ethnicity, language, faith. So trying to unpack what that might mean for individual children and families without making assumptions may be something that some practitioners aren’t as confident. I can only encourage be curious and ask. It may be that children and families haven’t thought about in a lot of the details, or there’s practices that have just been taken for granted, so having a conversation can really be helpful in that respect.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Thanks Kathy, that’s really great advice for practitioners out there to just make a start, have that courage to have those conversations, and you just learn and become more comfortable as time goes on, I imagine.

Now Rebekah, you’ve done a lot of really critical research in this space with your colleagues. What has the research evidence told us about the importance of understanding and meeting children and young people’s cultural needs, especially when they are interacting with the out-of-home care system?

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: Well look, there’s a great big body of research beyond the research that I’ve been part of myself, that is able to demonstrate a positive relationship between a positive sense of cultural identify and a sense of wellbeing. So we know that there’s a positive relationship between cultural identity and self-esteem, self-concept, and also on markers of subjective wellbeing. So this is a really important part of child development.

And beyond that, it’s actually a right as well. So we know that UN Convention on the Rights of the Child articulates the right of every child to be able to grow within their own cultural context. So it’s just so important.

And obviously when there’s traumatic disruption for a child from their family, as happens when a child is removed into care, there can be a real disconnect then between some of the cultural practices of home and the setting in which they now live, especially if it’s with a carer from a different setting.

So we know this is a big deal, we know it’s really important. I’ve been fortunate enough to lead a study that’s supported by the Australian Research Council, and we’ve been really digging in and looking at these issues and talking to lots of different stakeholders. I’ll try to be brief, Mandy, but just pull me up if I’m talking a little bit too long because we do have quite a few stakeholder groups.

So we did speak to policy and service leaders across Australia, in all of the different states of Australia, and we spoke to them about the idea of culture and how that’s supported. There was no question around their commitment to the importance of culture, but they did talk a lot about the barriers that they experience to being able to do that well. So one of the challenges that they raised was the fact that there isn’t consistent or accurate data that’s collected around culture, for example. So we were hearing stories about being told that a child had a particular cultural background, only to find out down the track that that in fact was not their cultural background. Meanwhile they’d been doing these activities, or providing the support, that was for a culture that was entirely disconnected to that child. So we were hearing those kinds of stories.

We were also hearing a lot about what culture means, or how to define that. They were conscious of the very nuanced and complex nature of culture, that you can’t just tick a box that says I’m one thing or the other, that it can be very different for each individual child. So how to address and work with that, and support that.

They described a lack of resources to be able to do this work. So these were the kinds of barriers that were raised by that particular stakeholder group.

We also spoke to children and their carers. Again, everybody agrees that culture is really important, and carers certainly thought that way too. But they were concerned as a group around how to support children well who were in their care. We came across some amazing examples of commitment from families, and beautiful work. So we spoke to a family, for example, who had a three-year-old Vietnamese little girl. They were learning Vietnamese themselves, and playing Vietnamese TV programs and music in the house, and connecting with the local culture, finding their own cultural mentors in supporting the cultural connections of that little girl. So some really lovely examples of great practice and commitment.

But carers found that supporting that cultural connection of children was even more difficult if the children themselves weren’t expressing an interest in finding out more about their own culture themselves. So that was a really tricky balance, or a tricky line to walk, between wanting to encourage and support that, but also wanting to be child-led and be guided by the child’s interest.

So we spoke to children as well, which was one of my favourite parts of the study. There’s lots of lovely rich data that came from children, and there were children who expressed in many different ways how important culture was to them. For example, I visited a five-year-old little girl who showed me pictures all over her bedroom wall of beautiful scenic images of Lebanon, and she was telling me all about how beautiful the country is that her mum was born in. And that was her way, talking about that connection and showing how important it was, to us.

Another boy for example, a 15-year-old boy was asked about his friends and who he was drawn to at school. In his words, he said, “Our own, I think it will be our own people, Pacific Islanders. I think it’s our experiences of what we’ve been through as Pacific Islanders. No one else will get it.” So he talked about those peer connections, and how important they were to him.

But we also spoke to children who said they weren’t very interested in their cultural background. So there was a variety of experience.

And then we also spoke to birth parents. Sorry, I told you there were lots of people that we spoke to. So we also spoke to birth parents. It was so important to birth parents that their children maintained the language, the rituals, the cultural routines. And of course culture is passed down in those rituals, in those things that just happen during the day. For example, the words that you might say before you eat, or something like that. Birth parents hoped that they could be involved in identifying those routines that mattered most to them, and in having them honoured and embedded within the foster homes that their children were living in. So it’s about relationship, and about immersion in culture when that is possible.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Great, Rebekah. Those stories and insights are so powerful to listen to when you’re obtaining them right from children themselves, and birth parents, so thank you for sharing that research that you’ve been involved in.

Now, I want to bring the conversation back to you, Arabella. We’re starting to understand that culture is really complex and it’s so unique. Thinking back to your experiences in care, you already touched on this a bit earlier, but could you maybe expand on how, or if, the practitioners and carers supporting you at the time, how they tried to take your cultural needs into account or not? How was that for you growing up?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: Well to put it simply, I just wasn’t asked. I wasn’t asked, and the expectation then fell onto my nonna, who’s my kinship carer, to be able to navigate that. And I can say also now, given that I am a carer myself for my younger siblings, my two sisters are Māori, I think a worker once said to me, “Oh, there’s an event going on on this date, you should go to that.” And I said, “No, our family doesn’t really do that, that’s not how we practice it.” It’s more in our day to day customs rather than attending a certain event which is just to tick-box it.

I think growing up, we learnt to answers the questions quite generically, and I myself just wasn’t really encouraged to explore what that meant. I also met my dad at a later age, I was 12 when I officially met him. Actually – correct, I was 11 when I met him. And I had absolutely no idea that I was Greek to start off with, and I had the most English last name at the time, which was Giddings. I remember everyone used to be like, “Giddings? You look so ethnic, it doesn’t make sense.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t have the answers for you.”

And then when I did meet my dad, I was so determined to take on this 11-letter surname that’s so hard to pronounce. I remember having anxiety around spelling it, because I was like, “There’s so many letters, and am I going to say it right? And if I say it to my dad and it's not right, is he going to then say something about it?” I was coaching myself all the time, “This is how you say it, and this is what you’re going to say when this person says, ‘explain this’.” So, it was a lot of mental, prepping, and me having to do that independently.

I also felt that my nonna wasn’t really supported through that as well. I think it would have been really beneficial if she was encouraged to explore her culture, and the reasons why our family moved to Australia. It wasn’t because sunshine and rainbows, she’s a post-war baby and that has impacts that are generational. So if she was encouraged to explore, then maybe she would have been able to have some insights and the self-awareness, and that would have then been passed on to me. I think that a conversation was necessary, and curiosity, genuine curiosity.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Yeah, I think that’s a good point, and perhaps having that conversation several times because things develop and evolve, and when people become more comfortable and safe to talk about it, then it’s creating that safe space, right? So your nonna might have been able to share some more information, but perhaps she didn’t feel safe because no one asked her, or opened that space for her. Thank you for sharing that, that’s a really powerful example.

I think what you said before about that tick box, I think there is always a risk and a concern that it is a tick-box exercise, especially for carers or practitioners who have so much going on, lots of different priorities. But I’d really like to talk about how we can go beyond this box checking, or going beyond the script, to focus more on being authentic and genuine in fostering cultural connections and meeting children’s needs, which is not necessarily, like you said in your example, going to an event, which might not be suitable for the family.

Back to you Kathy, what are your thoughts on how we can aim for more authenticity and genuineness?

KATHY KARATASAS: Thanks Mandy. I think the issues that Arabella’s mentioned really highlight the importance of intentional conversations with both children and young people, their carers, birth family members. It brings together the need to explore family history, to be asking questions around birth parents and their journeys, whether you use the SELF tool to guide conversations around where they settled, and what their ethnic traditions have been. Whether it’s around the meals, or whether they went to festivals, or the food that they ate, or how important language was, or how important rituals were, faith-based rituals were.

And collecting that information in a way that you can have conversations with children and carers around the layers of culture that can be part of individual families. And what the opportunities are to explore that, whether it’s by – for some families, it may be going to festivals. For others, it may not. For some families, it may be about food that has been traditional food that you want to pass on. For some families, it might be about words that are used to say hello or goodbye. Or for some families, as Rebekah mentioned, it may be about nursery rhymes for three-year-olds and so forth.

And I think it’s also about the importance of what you said around authenticity, that it is done on a regular basis. That we can be careful to not fall in that trap that because a child has said, “I’m not interested in my culture,” or maybe mum and dad are not connected to their culture at this point in time, that we don’t then stop asking. Because culture is something that we want to provide the opportunities for children to learn and explore and experience on an ongoing basis.

So as workers, as practitioners involved in children’s care, it’s our responsibility to lean in, be curious, ask questions again and again. Respectfully listen to where children and carers and families are, but while they’re in care, that we do that as a refresh on an ongoing basis, and we collect that information and store it for children in a Life Story work, or whatever’s meaningful, so that they can have reference poets to come back. Because one of the things that we also hear about, as children grow older they say, “I might not have been interested in my culture when I was 10 or 11 or nine, or what have you. But I am interested, I’m grateful for having that information and being able to re-connect.”

So being curious, doing it intentionally, annually, as regularly as possible, and being authentic about it.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Yeah, that’s really fantastic advice. As you’re talking, I actually started thinking about my own childhood. I think just having those conversations and bringing it up, like you said, even if the child’s not necessarily interested or forthcoming with that being their priority, at least you’re putting it out there as it just being as important as the mainstream or the dominant culture. Because sometimes when you’re from a minority background, it seems like there’s a hierarchy. You’re all trying to assimilate, or integrate, into the dominant culture. But by saying all cultures are interesting and exciting and valued, then that I think at least plants a seed for that child or young person that that’s something for them to explore when they’re comfortable to do so. So thanks very much for those insights, that was brilliant.

And Rebekah, what’s your perspective on this? Seeing research and services over the years, do you have anything to add to what’s been spoken about about this authenticity and this genuineness?

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: Yeah, it’s something that came up a lot in our research, and certainly there’s lots of ticking the box. There's lots of box ticking, there we go. There’s lots of box ticking that happens, we know that that’s the case and we know why that happens, and so we certainly had lots of description of those kinds of activities. For example, we had a Korean boy tell us that once a year the case worker shows up, they cook noodles, and that’s the cultural activity and that’s done. So there were activities like that.

But something that I can tell you about these kids in this study, and other kids I’ve worked with in out-of-home care, is that these kids have an amazing radar for inauthenticity. Their life experience has them pretty tuned in and they are not blind to what’s happening, and not blind to the tick-boxing, and that tick-boxing left a number of the young people we spoke to feeling a bit like a project. So, for example, 16-year-old Alejandro said, “They’re my case workers, yes. They tried to help me, yes. But I don’t like being a project.” So they were really tuned into that, and people doing what they felt they had to do.

So, previously I would have said tick-boxing and tokenism is never okay, but I’ve actually changed my tune just a little bit through the course of this research, and also having the opportunity to work closely with Kathy and Ghassan Noujaim from Settlement Services International. We actually wrote a paper together about a cultural newsletter that they had put together in Settlement Services International just to provide information around cultural events and different times of the year that were special for different cultural groups, and it was really effective as a conversation starter, as a starting point.

So I think tokenism is probably okay if it’s a starting point. If you don’t know what to do, if you don’t know where to start, if you want the conversations to happen, then maybe doing some of those things like eating food, or attending an event, or acknowledging particular cultural festivals, maybe that’s a starting point. So I’m going to say tokenism is okay as long as it’s only a starting point, as long as it’s a way to start to gather information, and to really prompt and stimulate conversations. It’s not okay if that’s where it starts and ends. But hopefully if that’s the beginning point of the journey, then that’s a really important beginning point.

I also want to mention that there are some fantastic tools that are out there that are really supportive in moving the conversation beyond tokenism. We know that cultural care planning is really important. When that’s done well, when that’s engaged with a range of stakeholders, including children and birth families and cultural leaders, we know that that can be a really effective tool, especially if it happens on an annual basis or on a regular basis. So that’s an important process.

Life story work we know can also be a really fantastic tool for gathering information, holding it in one place, helping children and young people to understand their stories. So I think that is also an important strategy as part of moving beyond tokenism.

The other thing that has come up in our research is the potential role of cultural mentors within our community. So, linking children with people who are from a similar cultural background, and who may be able to provide mentorship to the children, and to their carers actually. So there are some strategies that can be employed that really push it beyond that tokenistic approach.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s great. It’s nice to know that there are resources out there, especially people who are starting out, or starting early in their career who are not quite sure, there are evidence-based resources out there. We have a handout which can get you all started on where to search for some guides, and you’re more than welcome to contact us if you want help searching for any more resources.

I just wanted to ask you, Arabella, in previous conversations we had about your experiences as a carer yourself, how you’ve tried to navigate the diversity within your family, and how do you try and foster cultural connections as best you can, knowing you’re busy like a lot of us? Can you give us just a little bit of insight into what’s worked well for you?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: Yes. So for me, I seem to put my case management hat on a lot because I’ve got a social work background. I currently have my sister who’s 19, she’s Aboriginal, living with me for the first time, we’ve never lived with each other before so we’re learning how to be siblings. She’s also got an 18-month-old baby. And we’ve got my two sisters, nine and 11, and I frequently have my two brothers who come over to stay. When everyone’s in the house, it’s absolutely chaotic.

I like to listen in to what they’re saying. Recently I had my other brother say to my brother who’s in a foster care arrangement, he said with his little Kiwi accent, “You’re not South African bro, why are you doing that? Why are you saying these words?” My other brother was like, “Oh yeah, I’m actually not, that’s true.” And I was like oh, hold on a second, this is a moment where the cross-cultural differences are actually playing out. I had to stop and go, oh, hang on a second, how would that have made Woody, my brother, feel? As well as my other brother, Dylan.

And I was watching it, and I was seeing that disconnect that’s there. And in my brother who’s in care, he was feeling like he wanted to share that part of his story and that he’s made those connections there, but my other brother felt that that was that disconnect, that he was not identifying with his own culture. And I had that safe conversation with him afterwards.

And with the girls that in my care, at night time it’s buonanotte, it’s Italian, that’s how we say that. And pasta is our love language, being Italian. A plate of pasta means, ‘I love you, you’re well fed’. That’s how I grew up as well, food is a big connector.

And we do have open conversations and we revisit it time and time again. As we said before, sometimes the first conversation is a probe. It’s that we might not be ready to have that conversation because we don’t know what it means, but you’ve sparked the idea in my head and planted the seed for me to ruminate and think in my own time. Now, when you first asked me, I might have not been ready to have that conversation, but if you asked me again, then the encouragement and thought might be there.

I think that it’s important for us to all be curious, and take a very playful nature to it as well, especially with children. You can be quite goofy and ask a question and let it be child-led, let them make the script, let them direct us. I think that overall is going to work towards actively debunking the generalisations, stereotypes, and assumptions.

I think for me, I needed help in exploring my identity. So when I think about me as a practitioner as well as a kinship carer, I want to help them build on their identity and explore that safely, and to feel safe in asking me any question that they need to. And sometimes I recognise that I need to actually follow through and go, “Hang on a second, do you want to talk about that a little bit more?” And then ask again and again, in a safe way. But it is important for us to encourage that and be curious.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s great, thanks for sharing that experience in your family. I can imagine there are lots of dynamics and interesting things going on when you’re all together, it actually sounds lovely. I think it’s really valuable that you don’t even realise sometimes when you’re just in that environment, you just are learning things, and if you just have that open attitude, then people have that safe environment. I really like that point you made, Arabella, about knowing yourself, knowing your own identity. It’s through being comfortable with yourself and your identity, regardless of your background, allows you to have that open, honest, non-judgemental conversation with other people. So thanks for pointing that out, that’s really great advice.

Now let’s expand on that topic a little bit more. Like you said, in your research and people you’ve spoken to, there is a desire, maybe more than decades ago, that practitioners and services really do want to have a stronger focus on addressing cultural needs of all children, particularly children from CALD backgrounds. Kathy, in your work, and perhaps even some of your travels on this Churchill Fellowship, can you please suggest some ways, or some advice, of how services and practitioners can bring that stronger focus, and bring that to the top of the priority when it’s needed for children?

KATHY KARATASAS: Thanks Mandy. I think there’s just a breadth of issues to touch on. I think one of them is that culture is so diverse. As Arabella said, the intersectionality of what the layers of what influences children and young people and adults, and ethnic and faith and language and culture is one, obviously gender and sexuality and ability, all those other issues. So being aware of the diversity of those issues is important.

But in terms of cultural connections, as Rebekah said, we want to honour that responsibility for all children. Although we’re focusing on children from culturally and linguistically diverse, this is true for all children. They’ve got a right to know their family, or know information around their family, community, and culture.

So, how we nurture conversations and opportunities to keep that dialogue alive, because the thing that we’re realising in conversations here, that I’ve had in my travels, is we’ve got to be careful that we balance listening to children’s feedback, so that they know themselves. The children often won’t know if we don’t provide those opportunities for them.

Sometimes children will say, “We’re not interested.” But from a wellbeing perspective, and from our responsibility for holistic care and attention to what we know is important, how we as practitioners and as carers think through those opportunities to provide exposure to children is really important, and balancing – when kids say, “I’m not interested,” with giving them exposure. I think that’s one of the challenges and opportunities. When children say, “I don’t want to go to the dentist”, we don’t go, “Okay, we’re not going to go to the dentist ever again.” We work out ways, for example, to give attention to that.

And the opportunities we provide for children comes through in different ways when we least expect it. So I give the example, two of my children, who are second-generation Greek. I tried to send them to Greek school when they were little, and their Greek language is very limited. And as adults and teenagers, when I hear them say things like, “Why didn’t you make me learn Greek?” and “Why didn’t you force me to go to Greek school?” And it’s like, I did! You just weren’t interested in it. Or when I hear one of them go, “Of course I’m going to marry a Greek.” They’re second-generation Australians, and there’s this sense of cultural connection and pride in their history. I’ve got four children, and that’s not shared by all of them, but children surprise us about what’s important.

Just the other issue, I think, is as practitioners, and as Arabella mentioned, how do we nurture conversations with kinship carers, and carers, around what’s important? And equally, how we lean in to find family members, to explore from parents, from grandparents, from extended family, that the children’s history – in an area of child protection and out-of-home care, sometimes we can default by not giving that as much attention.

And if we’re authentic, relationships and conversations can be nurtured. You start from somewhere, and you might reference a cultural care plan, or a resource that Rebekah talked about, that might seem tokenistic, and you check that out. Does this make sense? Are festivals the things that are important to you? Is noodles the thoughtful meal? What is important? What is your food of love? And if you’re willing to have those conversations, you’ll collect information and that will be of interest for children, if not today, maybe tomorrow or the day after.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s really great. I think culture is something we carry with us for our entire life, and not making assumptions too early on that people aren’t interested and not recording that information, or searching for family history, or other things. I think it will be of value at some point. So be confident in that, that the effort you’re making is going to be referenced back in future, if not the present day.

Rebekah, any thoughts from your perspective, and your work and what the research has looked at, in terms of how do we -

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: Move forward? Look, I think one of the most important things is actually around data. I think there’s an old expression that says, ‘We measure what matters’, and so if we’re not measuring, if we’re not capturing this information, then it can get a little lost when we’re determining priorities, or looking at how resources should be distributed.

So I think one of the really important first steps is to be able to collect this information, and to collect it well, and collect it for all children. I really love Kathy’s position around thinking about culture for all children. The SELF model that Kathy described, I think that’s fantastic, she referred to it early in the seminar. So it’s about settlement, ethnicity, language, and faith.

I think sometimes we assume, or we look at a child, and we say, “Oh, you’re culturally diverse so we’ll collect cultural information about you.” But we shouldn’t make assumptions. I think every child has a culture. You could look at an Anglo looking child, for example, and not know that their Russian heritage, or their Scandinavian heritage, or their Scottish heritage is really important to them.

And of course, there’s diversity of faith and religion, and that will be true and different for every child.

So I think collecting information, coming to understand each child and what’s important to them, and how they identify, is really, really important as a first step.

I also would like to advocate for the importance of cultural care plans done well, involving all the stakeholders, and for them to be annual. So at the moment in Australia annual cultural care plans are required for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, which is terrific. But for children who are non-Indigenous and culturally diverse, a cultural care plan is only required on entry to care. And you can see just from the discussion today how not helpful that may be.

Arabella told us about not discovering her Greek heritage until she was 11. So the nuance, or the complexity, may take some time to emerge, and a child’s interest in culture may wax and wane, and so I think regular cultural care planning is really important, and with all of the right people in the room. We wouldn’t want that to slip into being a tick the box exercise either, we want that genuine discussion and conversation.

And the importance of not closing the door for children on the conversation. If the child says, “I’m not interested, I don’t care that my father was Vietnamese”, or whatever it is, that doesn’t mean that it will always be that way. Children have a right to that information, and for easy access to that information, and a right for that to be facilitated, and it’s okay for their interest to wax and wane. We don’t ever close the door.

The last thing I really wanted to talk to you about was the idea of cultural humility, and I think it’s probably a concept that will be very familiar to a lot of people. We’ve really moved beyond I think the cultural competence frame, where we thought that being a good practitioner meant having all the information and knowing a lot about different cultural groups. We’ve moved to a cultural humility frame, which is about really understanding the fact that we all have a culture, that we all bring assumptions and behaviours and narratives and practices that reflect our own culture.

And so to understand that and to see it for it is, to understand that systems are big machines that try to provide a one size fits all solution, and are shaped to reflect the dominant culture. Systems are cultural, and so to be able to see that and to recognise that, and to feel comfortable with complexity. So to be able to sit with that, to sit and feel comfortable with the complexity of children’s situations and feelings, and not to shy away from those complexities, is really important.

So for me, there’s almost no more important work that we could doing for those of us who work in this space around reflecting and understanding our own culture, and understanding that that will be shaping our responses. And to see it for what it is, instead of seeing it as a base line and everybody else is somehow diverse from that.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s a really important insight, just naming the things that aren’t necessarily named, and having that awareness, and conscious awareness, I think will help people understand and know when it’s needed to unpack and bring that cultural humility. I think that’s a really great concept to take because, as you know, we’ve all spoken, culture is very complex I think.

Arabella, in your experiences can you talk a bit more about this complexity, how it plays out in your family, and things that you’ve learnt that could be useful for practitioners to take away with them to help them in their practice?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: I think for me, it’s that person-centred approach, and making it child-led, and also within collaboration with parents, biological parents, carers, foster carers, the children, everyone. All the stakeholders need to be a part of a that conversation.

And I love the idea of doing it annually because it’s changing, and modern day society is changing so rapidly, and there’s such a disconnect as it is. So we need to be able to sit down and have that open conversation, and do that within collaboration. I think that for me, I once was told by a boy who was in care that I’m lucky because I blend in. My skin is white, and I fit into societal – well, the majority.

And while I agree that that has been something that is a shield for me, that people don’t ask me more questions, in the same breath it also works against me because no one thought it was important to ask the question, and how that might have impacted it. It became my responsibility to navigate that by myself. And I already had a lot of pressures of not being like everybody else, my peers, the people I went to school with, so I automatically felt that gap. And it shouldn’t be the expectation of the child to navigate that, or the expectation of the carer to solely be the one to educate around culture. It has to be all of us coming together to support.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge everyone’s background and their walks of life. So it would be to definitely have that conversation, have the conversation, remain curious, and it’s okay not to be the expert. I don’t know half of the things and that’s okay as well, I’m human. Just remain curious in everything that we do.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Great, fantastic, very important advice there. So we’ve come to the part of the webinar where we will take some audience questions, but I’m just going to sneak one in, if that’s okay? I’m really curious to unpack a little bit more issues around mixed heritage, just briefly, because I feel like as our society becomes a little bit more diverse there are children who have mixed heritages, but they might look a certain way that brings stereotypes and assumptions. Or they might have a certain language that they are more familiar with that’s not English, that again might draw some assumptions or stereotypes from people who don’t know them. I’m curious to understand, how do we take that into account when we’re meeting a child or family?

Kathy, do you have any insights on that?

KATHY KARATASAS: Yeah, I do. Mandy, I think one of the challenges, as Rebekah said, is how do we count, and how do we count the data? How do we actually look at identifying culture? At the moment, our system puts an umbrella term of CALD, culturally and linguistically diverse, in child protection and out-of-home care, and even that’s not kept consistent. If a child has Aboriginality, generally speaking, their Aboriginal culture will be the primary one, and obviously for good reasons, and then the other mixed heritage or other cultures aren’t captured as well.

While the system may have capacity to do it, we as practitioners need to value that, and that’s about asking questions and breaking it down. I think the SELF approach or the SELF concepts can allow for that, and asking that for both the child’s parents, their mother, their grandparents, their father, the grandparents, so asking that paternal heritage. And in cultural care plans, you can do that, you can ask those questions, you can get that information as a basic identity. So it could be Australian-born but Vietnamese Korean parental heritage, and Greek Australian maternal heritage. And it might be Christian and Greek Orthodox faith, and the language might be English generally with a bit of – I’m making it up – Korean, or what have you.

You can ask those questions, and look at that mixed heritage, and ask the questions around what is the heritage? Is it that the parents migrated? Is it that the grandparents migrated? So it’s building that profile, for want of a better word, or that information around what is this child’s ancestry? And through questions you can work out what might be important and of interest.

They might not be interested in all aspects in the next six months or 12 months, some may be of more interest. But having that accurate, as Rebekah said we need it to be accurate, we don’t want to be exposing children to cultures – and that also takes into consideration their permanent kinship carers too, that’s another element. When we’ve got children in long-term care with a carer who shares a different culture, keeping records and thinking about that allows us to be thinking about what we’re also exposing this child to, new cultures that they may or may not be – hopefully they’re interested in because it’s a permanent placement. But it allows us to be having those conversations around what that looks like for a child.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That’s a great point because by taking the effort to record those different elements, it’s going beyond the labelling. Because I think it can be quite easy for people, especially if they’re busy ,to just use a label like Vietnamese without understanding what comes under that umbrella. So we’ve got a question here about research.

Rebekah, is there much research about this kind of mixed heritage issue, and whether that is being recorded in a better way in our existing systems?

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: Look, I’m going to say no. Maybe some of my colleagues will be aware of research that I’m not conscious of. Certainly in the Australian context, a large body of research around cultural diversity in care is focused on Indigenous children, as it should be given the very significant over-representation of Indigenous children in care. But much less around children from other cultural contexts, and that’s reflected in policy and in the resources that are available.

Hence, our project, I guess. We saw a real need for work to develop understanding and resource and models in this space. I should acknowledge the POCLS study, so the Pathways Of Longitudinal Care Study, which is an Australian study that is also gathering this data and doing some great work in thinking about how to measure and understand culture and the complexity of culture.

So there’s not even a lot in terms of non-Indigenous CALD children, let alone CALD children who then have very diverse cultural profiles themselves. So definitely, I think, a lot of space and room for more thinking around this in a research context and practice context.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Yes, I think what you mentioned earlier about understanding the intersectionality would be really critical to providing that person-centred care, Arabella, that you talked about. Really gathering that information, but then tailoring it to that person’s circumstances and needs, I think that is a good aim to go for.

We’re almost coming up to time so perhaps another little question around – I’ll just open it up. Does anyone have any other thoughts, just quickly, on what policies or systems can do more broadly to provide a more supportive environment for practitioners and services?

KATHY KARATASAS: I was going to say -

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: The fact – sorry, go.

KATHY KARATASAS: Sorry Rebekah, I was just going to say two things. One is building on what Rebekah said before around cultural humility. Be encouraged as practitioners to have conversations with your colleagues and your manager around what your thinking is, around your ideas, in a safe environment because we all have our views on what we think is x, y, and z, and what we’ve been influenced. So if you can explore that with your colleagues, or in a safe place, it helps you unpack some of your thinking and your assumptions.

And the other issue is around checking out information. So one of the things that we do that goes hand in hand with a cultural care plan may be a cultural booklet, which is a resource on a breadth of different issues around celebrating Country and language and food, which is always great, music, and finding out celebrities who have the same heritage, and sports players and so forth, because they can be resources that can help start conversations. So start looking at information so that you can be educated, or start learning more around cultures, because we can’t know everything about all the cultures of children that we’re working with, but there are some starting points. So have those conversations with colleagues and look at building those resources like the newsletter or cultural booklets.

DR MANDY TRUONG: A final comment from you, Rebekah?

PROFESSOR REBEKAH GRACE: Oh, I was going to say it would be hard to end this conversation without mentioning the cultural matching issue. In the research literature that does exist, there’s an emphasis on trying to match children with foster homes where there’s a shared culture. So I just wanted to comment really briefly on that, how wonderful that is when that can happen, but how difficult that is because of the limited number of foster carers, and the diversity and complexity of culture.

So what we have learnt from our study is that cultural matching, when it can’t happen, it needs to at least be the right foster carer even if it’s not a matched foster carer. And the right foster carer is somebody who is humble and curious, and willing to learn and willing to go on a journey in terms of learning about culture. So if there were two words that I think could summarise our discussion today across the board, it would be humble and curious. That’s the key words, the key elements.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Some great take-outs, yes, something we can all take away in all aspects of our lives, to be honest. And over to you, Arabella, any final insights you’d like to share with our audience?

ARABELLA STRAVOLEMOS: Yes, when I think about social work and when I was doing my last placement at Key Assets, I was looking at what we’re actually given initially as practitioners and also as carers. We’re given really limited resources around it and kind of have to go along that journey to unpack it. I think that a really important tool that could be beneficial would be to paint the picture of the child’s history beforehand.

I recently did a genogram with my social worker from Key Assets and we were like, “Oh my gosh, it’s just going on and on and on.” I was like, “Well, this family here is intertwined to that”, and then once we finally did we saw how big my family is, and how diverse our story is.

Just having that tool in itself, it’s not needed, it’s not an expectation for a social worker to do this with you, it was a choice by the social worker to do this with me. I’m really thankful for it because I was able to look at it and go, “Oh my gosh, this is my family, and this is my family line”, and it showed me what was there. Even though you might have it in your head, when it’s down on paper, or in front of you, it seems to sink in a little bit different. So it’s about providing those tools to make it just that little bit easier.

And then second to that, it’s the self-awareness. I always say that to have empathy, you need to know yourself first. So, you can’t simply understand someone else’s situation if you just don’t know your own. So, to explore that, and it should be professional development for workers and carers that specifically looks at exploring yourself and unpacking your story. For carers, I would like to see that, to talk about not just their story as a carer, but their individual story, and how that impacts the people around you. Systems theory would be great at looking at that. We have the knowledge, we just need to put it into practice.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Fantastic, such powerful words, Arabella. I appreciate you being here today and sharing your vast experiences with our audience. Thank you also to Kathy and Rebekah. I’ve learnt so much and taken away so much, and I’m greatly appreciative of your time as part of our webinar.

Thank you to our audience for tuning in, and also the AIFS communication team, and Child and Family Evidence and Evaluation team, for all their hard work behind the scenes.

Please subscribe to our AIFS newsletters to be notified about the recording, and also there will be a feedback survey that will pop up. If you have the time, we’d really appreciate your feedback. We’re always trying to improve our webinars, and bring to light the topics that you’re interested in that will help your work.

So we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar on the 9^th of October which will be on the pets and intimate partner violence topic. Registrations for that one will open next week.

Again, thank you to our presenters, really grateful, and thanks for joining in. We’ll see you again very soon, have a great day.