LYDIA TROWSE: Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar, 'Supporting families to navigate tough times: the impact of financial and housing insecurity, isolation and discrimination.'

My name is Lydia Trowse, and I am the child and family partnership advisor at Emerging Minds.

To begin, I would like to acknowledge country. We recognise the land on which we meet today and pay respect to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors, Elders, past and present and emerging, from the different First Nations across the country.

We acknowledge the importance of connection to land, culture, spirituality, ancestry, family and community for the well-being of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families.

Before we dive into our discussion today, I have a little housekeeping to cover.

We will have a live Q&A at the end, so you can submit questions via the questions box in the go to webinar dashboard. This will be recorded and available in about two weeks via the AIFS newsletter or the AIFS website under the webinar banner.

There are a few related readings and resources which will be in the handout section of your go to webinar Control Panel.

And there are also closed caption is available for this webinar and the link for those is in the chat box.

There will be a short feedback survey which will open at the end of the webinar.

Before we begin, we would like to recognise the children, young people and adults within families and diverse communities with many and varied lived experiences who have come before us.

We appreciate the experiences of people whose pain, trauma and heartache, including harmful systemic practices require recognition and compassion.

We recognise the strengths and know-how that children and families have drawn on to navigate difficult times, and we respect the skills people have developed to contribute their lived experience.

We are committed to deeply listening and responding with integrity to their voices and expertise.

I would also like to mention missing voices. We hope that the resources we share today will have something to offer all families, but we recognise they are simply a snapshot of the lived experiences of the families who create them. Other families will have different experiences and stories to share.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices are not reflected in these resources as we intentionally create resources with and for humanity that reflect cultural ways of knowing and doing.

The things we're talking about today disproportionately affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and while addressing this is outside the scope of this project is something we carry in our hearts and it remains critical and will be a future piece of work at Emerging Minds.

Our approach will be to co-create these resources with and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and if you want to read more about our approaches you can check the Emerging Minds website.

I will introduce the presenters now. It is my pleasure to welcome Kerry Hawkins, Zan Maeder and Emi Artemis. Kerry, can you please share who you are and why you are here?

KERRY HAWKINS: Thanks, Lydia. I should also say that I am on the unceded Wurundjeri lands of the Kulin Nation today for this webinar.

I am in Emerging Minds webinar, I have been for some years now, and the reason I am a board member is I originally came to Emerging Minds looking for help, as a family member, actually looking for practical real help that I was not finding anywhere else in the system.

And I engaged with Lydia who invited me to come to provide advice from a family perspective on the work that Emerging Minds does.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you. Zan?

ZAN MAEDER: My name is Anne, I use they/them pronouns and I am on Kaurna land. I am a therapist in alternative practice at the moment, and I have been very lucky to be involved in this project and I should also say I am a parent of a small human, and we will find out more.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you. EM?

EMI ARTEMIS: I also use they/them pronouns and I'm coming from the Kaurna lands. And I'm here to provide lived experience perspective as a parent who has lived through different forms of distress and hardship and has come out the other side.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you. It has been a huge honour to work with these three people today. I really hope that everyone here joining gets a snippet of what I have been able to learn from these three people which has been really amazing.

Kerry, I thought we could begin with you. This whole project started because you were persistent in reminding me about the devastating impact of poverty on families and children.

Would you be able to say a bit about this and what it was like for you trying to get support for your family at that time?

KERRY HAWKINS: So, the context for our family was catastrophic mental health crises over many, many years.

Significantly impacting the emotional impact on our family including our children, but probably the worst thing of all apart from the mental health system that did not work was the lack of supports and the lack of money.

At a time when you most need resources, human resources, financial resources to deal with crises. And I had to give up work to keep my loved one alive when the system failed.

You find yourself in shock, probably we went from two middle-class incomes down to nothing, absolute nothing.

The inability of the system to respond that was our reality. It blew me away.

I am educated, white, middle-class, with a sense of agency, went looking, looked under every corner, went to every agency, asked everybody I could to help. Nobody addressed it. And probably, from our perspective, in some ways even worse, the kind of help we got was not helpful.

I had been going asking for real practical support to address our lack of income in a world where you need income to survive. And would instead find that I had so many people employed to do things, and I would really much rather have the money that they were being paid, frankly.

It was like a double whammy of having no income, feeling abandoned, feeling betrayed by the world. And looking for help everywhere. And just not getting it. Getting lots of sympathy. Getting lots of, "My gosh, this is postcode lottery. If you live somewhere else you might get a $50 voucher for something."

And that is compounded, we use sanitised language but the horrible feelings of shame and humiliation trying to survive in a community where everybody else kind of assumes that you have money and you simply don't. It is such a foundational, toxic, compounding experience on top of already really, really distressing crises that you are trying to hold.

It was just this compounding experience of circumstances and emotions that are paralysing, isolating. It fills you with physical dread. There is physical pain inside you all the time.

And then, you have people telling you, if you go to a counsellor for support, they will just say, "You just have to kind ofManage your emotions." And you core and tying yourself from this existential threat that you are surrounded by all day, every day.

Actually they tell us that it is the lack of our budgeting skills, for example, when you have no income to manage and then told you have to manage an income is incredibly offensive and insulting and just adds to that emotional load.

My memories of that time, those times, was just, we would go from a family where we had a share portfolio and then being told, "You don't know how to manage money. This is your fault."

Every experience came back to us. And it was stigmatising. It was paralysing. It nearly destroyed us. The impact it had on my parenting was huge.

I did it alone. And no one, ever, ever should do that alone.

And neither not be kind of blame, I think there was an implication of blame from friends, families, service providers. Or just simply invisible. Whether it is the mental health system, whether it is the so-called support systems, which are for 99.5 percent of your existence you are invisible.

There is so much exhaustion and terror that come from these experience.

And so, whenever I go to a service or look for help, that just kind of blew me away. And so, with Emerging Minds, at least, I had a sense that maybe at least if we can do something to address and amplify the lived experience of these circumstances, maybe somehow we can get some structural reform happening.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thanks, Kerry, for sharing all of that detail. You said it better than anyone about the huge impacts on your family and children.

Can you talk a bit about why it matters that practitioners are able to explore the ways that families and children are always responding to these impacts?

KERRY HAWKINS: This is the one point where it matters because how practitioners approach this is so important and can make all the difference.

If, at least, there is no more harm being done, so not been blamed. Understanding and supporting how families can get through this without internalising the blame and the shame. Emi said that families can come through this. We did come through it. We mostly came through it because I was kind of able to work through these issues and connect with other families and I suddenly realised it wasn't us, it wasn't our fault, actually. We were not an anomaly.

That gave me more courage to keep pushing and working through rather than giving up and living in despair.

And so, the way that people interact with us, at least not seeing us as walking deficits. At least giving us strength and praise to keep moving.

I was hoping, eventually we could get to the point, where people have some structural competency around these things to actually help provide us with some proper structural supports as well. So we don't have to keep doing all of that work around the help seeking.

I remember once we had a Centrelink work in the hospital system, a social worker, who was looking at helping us with Centrelink, and they gave up. They came back and said, "This is too high. I'm sorry. This is a number. See what you can do."

Always, always, the load of help seeking, service navigation such as it was, comes back on to families. And I was having to hold all of our family's needs and at least having someone to share the load would have been amazing, it would have made a lot of difference for us.

LYDIA TROWSE: That is really important advice. Thank you, Kerry.

Did you want to mention quickly why the title of this webinar feels like a bit of an oversimplification to you?

KERRY HAWKINS: Thanks, Lydia. That was my first response when I saw the title for this webinar. I don't know if it flagged anything with other people.

But for me, and I'm not even sure that simplification is the response I had. Actually, it was responsive gosh, this is such a sanitised distance almost Orwellian description of our experience.

Our experiences were of violence, betrayal, abandonment by the system.

You can talk about housing in security when you live that, when you have people threatening to take away your house when you have to navigate with banks and other service systems that blame you when you are living with and you have that fear in your stomach because you are not quite sure how you are going to provide that five dollars for a school excursion when you actually are faced with not living in the house that you thought you would be able to provide for your children, all of those experiences do not resonate with the language, the sanitised hygienic language of insecurity.

I just wonder whether it is actually masking and maybe providing a bit of cover for actual structural action that needs to happen in this space.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you for raising that and certainly as we work through this and Zan came on board, restarted referring to it as structural oppression and I've heard people use structural violence as terminology as well which is probably more fitting for people's lived experiences. Thanks, Kerry.

I am going to talk quickly about the approach that we talk coordinating this project. So we took a coproduction approach and when I was the staff member at Emerging Minds, sort of coordinating it, the way that I set it up was with two lived experience to mentors, Kerry was one and we had another person, Louise, who mentored me and had a huge variety of roles in ways that they supported me in frameworks and understandings and trying to set up accountable, safe enough spaces for lived experience co-design work to happen.

And then I also worked with four main co-designers and Emi was one of those and there were three other people as well. That was the core working group that we worked with together and of course throughout the project we heard from lots of other lived experience voices as well but we had this core group of four lived experience co-designers and we spent a lot of time setting up and preparing to do the work and developed a mission statement and values, and we were trying to make this safe enough for people.

Under Kerry's guidance, we followed a process that is a bit too deep to get into now but getting into the literature, created a structure that would explore what structural oppression is like for families and the impacts and how families and children can survive. And from our analysis of those things, resources and topics began to imagine that's when we were lucky enough to connect with Zan.

So it was a bit of an informal process, meetings and and making sure that the values and ways of working aligned with the project and then we formally on-boarded Zan and started to work together And under their guidance created a resource development process adapted from collective narrative practice.

We managed to come up with a few different ways of hearing children's voices, direct and indirect, so that we could try and make children visible in these resources. Naturally, once you develop your content, there was quite a significant review process, both lived experience practitioner internal and external to Emerging Minds. Importantly, all the people whose lived experience appear in these resources were asked to review it. For some people it was meeting online and talking through it if the resource was too tricky for them to read through themselves but it was really important that people got to check how they were portrayed in the resources and that the quote was correct and that they didn't want to change, or maybe they did want to change how they had said something.

I think if I was to say overall, a summary of this process, I think I would say that it really mattered that the work was relational and it held a commitment to sharing power with and amplifying the voices of children and families impacted by structural oppression. That's a little bit about the process. I thought it would be really interesting now to hear from Zan. Could you step us through some of the intentions of the resources that we created together?

ZAN MAEDER: For sure. There's a lot that we could say about this. I guess hearing from Kerry at the beginning and a framework is speaking to what families are up against, money, housing, structural change, addressing racism. I don't work for Emerging Minds. I was a consultant. But Emerging Minds is not a direct service provider, so that is outside the scope of what is possible within this project but nonetheless, we still had some pretty ambitious hopes and intentions which were to walk alongside families who are going through incredibly tough times, of all different kinds. Sometimes many at the same time, and try to provide some relief, however small, from the kind of isolation, shame, blame and stigma, all of which carries hope to, that often comes on the tough times and just make them so much harder to survive.

So part of this was about sparking memories of all new ideas for ways of getting through and for holding on to what is important to families. And always trying to keep the focus on kids and impacts on kids, children's contributions to their families and how they are active participants in the survival.

One of the things that I always like to mention, hopefully you had a chance to have a look at the resources on the website, and the names of the resources I think are a bit misleadingly generic. They make it sound like they are guides which is not really accurate. We wanted them to be accessible but ultimately, they are invitations, not advice, and we always try to centre diversity, and emphasised the way that history and culture and social location shape our experience of the problems and what's possible in responding. So we try to make that visible wherever possible because as Lydia said, the scope of whose voices were directly included in this project was always going to be limited.

Some of the principles that underlie this project, that preexisted me, but also are aligned with principles of narrative practice, one of which is the family is not the problem. So as was described, not seeing us as a walking deficit, adding that's a great way of letting it. The problems are gendered violence, lack of access to safe childcare, housing and all of these things. These are the problems. Children are not the problems and parents and carers are not the problems and the families or even communities are not the problem.

So an important principle is locating the problems and separating them from people and locating them in a relational context. The other part of that is that it creates room for agency in relation to the problems that we are up against. If the problem is inside of you, it's a lot harder to address than if you can see that it is located in context, and it's not your fault, and it stops pitting family members against each other and I guess part of how we portrayed that in the resources as well is making sure to really, as much as possible, richly describe the problems that families are facing.

They are probably still a tad too long from an accessibility perspective but it was so important to be painting a stark picture of what it is like to be parenting in poverty, while homeless, while poor and/or facing racism because that is the backdrop for understanding the kinds of circumstances that families have to survive and care for each other.

That's why it is so important. Those two stories alongside of each other of oppression, of resistance, and our hope is that families reading this seeing other families stories and what they are applicants rendered more visible might help reduce those feelings of blame and responsibility or failure that are so prolific.

And that dovetails into another principle, which again, Kerry has already referred to which is that families are always already responding. Children already are always responding. That is a baseline assumption of all of these resources. Every person has skills and knowledge that they are using every day to negotiate the things that they are facing and to hold onto their values, and what we also believe is that when those skills and knowledge is made less visible, they become less available so when that happens, we can become more vulnerable to other people's ideas about what we should be doing, especially practitioners in welfare services, counsellors or whoever and we might be, that can be kind of considered the experts on our lives, rather than, whether or not those solutions are relevant to our context, or possible, and that of course contributes to this sense of responsibility and blame.

So in some small way the resources hope to contribute to relocating expertise back within families and communities to spark possibilities for the reclamation of agency because again, referring back to what was previously said again, however small a spark of agency years, it can be so significantly influential in the face of crushingly intractable problems like poverty. It really does matter and when that is taken away, it is incredibly harmful, dangerous and violent.

Another intention of this project, like we always mention for most of the resources, families and possibly older, young people, parents and carers but hopefully there are ways in which children, the stories can be shared with children as well, an adjunct reader helping professionals and again, I think it's already clear from what we have shared so far that the reality is those of us in this work have a huge capacity to become agents of oppression and to compound harm. When we slip into believing that problems lie within families or that there are easy fixes.

A dominant cultural response to families struggling with disconnection is often to ask what are they doing wrong? What should there be doing better? Are these relationships functional or dysfunctional, healthy, unhealthy, right, wrong? Some of these may be familiar to you in your fields of practice. Aside from contributing to blame and stigma, those kinds of questions obscure a multitude of normative assumptions about how families, parents and kids should look, behave and live in those normative assumptions are inevitably privileging the ways of living of straight, white, rich, heterosexual, able-bodied, et cetera families that are not relevant to all families. There is value in all different ways of being.

So hopefully throughout displaying the voices of lived experience, we hope that practitioners no matter experience level are invited into new knowledges of tough times. I've been privileged enough to work in community services most of my adult life and there were so many moments of deep understanding and challenged assumptions that I have from participating in this process so I feel really confident that any practitioner could read these resources and be challenged in ways that are immensely important for the work of standing alongside families who are up against it.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you so much. I love the way that you use words to describe all of these concepts and understandings. It's really wonderful and talented. Emi, I'm going to throw to you. Would you be able to talk a bit about what it was like being involved in creating these resources as a co-designer? What was the process like for you?

EMI ARTEMIS: I found the process really fantastic. Very new for me because we came in with a very open-ended mindset. So we knew what we wanted to do, which was to create these resources, but we were kinda, we didn't quite know how we were going to get there so that meant that we evolved the whole process as we went along and I think having that really open mindset was really helpful in allowing us, the group that I was with, all of us co-designers, to evolve in our understanding as well, as the resources took shape so we took shape as the resources took shape in a way. So it was very much a learning process. And it's already been talked about, this idea of externalising some of the things that we have experienced.

For myself, experienced raising my children in poverty. Homelessness, violence, discrimination, all that stuff. That process of creating the resources also, with this externalising of these issues, that we had gone through.

So, as we have started to unpick what it meant, what this idea of structural oppression meant, in terms of our own experiences, I am sure the other people would have done as well, started to see that we were not at fault for what had happened. This was a societal problem.

We really started to understand this quite clearly.

That was a great process to be able to do that. To externalise these issues and to take these feelings of failure and inadequacy out of ourselves, out of myself, and to really put it where it was which was a societal failure.

We were just doing what we had to do and society wasn't picking up the slack.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you, Emi.

Can you describe some of the impacts for you and your children for being involved? You have already described one of the impacts there. Were there any others that you wanted to mention?

EMI ARTEMIS: So many impacts, it is hard to narrow it down into a few sentences. The impact was overall amazing. I grew in confidence. I suppose, like, when I started doing the resources, if I had thought about what we had been through, I would say, we went through some tough times and came out the other end.

That is a short and narrow of it. There was so much in that. Doing the resources meant that I was able to look back and actually what, sorry, what I had done, and what the children and I, the skills that we brought to the things that we have been going through, and really kind of interrogate and unpick history, and some of that was quite challenging.

Even so, we stuck with it. And so, instead of kind of saying, you know, it was hard but we got through. I was able to see exactly how we do that. What skills I actually drew upon to get ourselves out of this situation. What skills my children brought to what was going on to get ourselves out of the situation. It wasn't just a matter of some how we did it. We could actually name how we did it and see how we did it.

And see that even the times when I felt, you know, when we were homeless, living in a tent, and the kids were really suffering, I could see them being damaged by what was going on, I could see it in their behaviour. Even in those times when I felt like a complete mess and a complete failure, actually, no, we were doing things to help ourselves and even the kids, at one stage they were throwing rocks at each other, it was awful. Setting up the tent and they are throwing rocks.

Even in those moments, doing what they needed to do, obviously throwing rocks isn't great, but part of that is that they were navigating this terrible situation they were in which is that they don't have a home or school. Not doing what kids are meant to do which is have fun and come home to a table full of food and all that kind of stuff. They were not doing that.

And so, we were all kind of bringing to each moment what we needed to do to survive. And it worked because we survive.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you for sharing those examples. Really powerful examples.

One of my fears for this project is that we would do more harm by making visible all of this structural oppression that families were facing, and then not really having anything to offer. Anything that you have started to describe there is the way that these resources can help people recognise their skills and know-how, that they are using, that they have.

What impact do you hope these resources will have for other families and children?

EMI ARTEMIS: So, I think, first of all, like you said, we are naming what's going on. And so, when I was going through some really tough things, I felt like there was no one else going through this. There was really no help for me. We were just kind of thrashing through the bush kind of thing.

So, what these resources do in the first instance is show other families going through really hard times that they are not alone. They are not the first people to go through that. And so, that alone is really helpful. You can see your story represented in another person.

And so, there is that aspect, but also I think we are able to give a sense of hope because I did these resources from a perspective in the sense that I was looking back, and unpicking what happened. And talking about what happened. I could do that with the retrospective lens because I'm now housed and my children are older. Our life is really good, how we wanted.

It took us a while to get there, but we got there. It is really important from this authentic, lived experience perspective people who have gone through this to be able to say, "Yeah, I was able… this is what I did and this is how I got there. Everyone has a different way of doing it but you will find a way, and you can find a way. Don't give up hope."

I don't want to give anyone advice because what advice can you give? It is really about kind of saying, I hear you, and there is hope.

LYDIA TROWSE: Nice words, Emi. Thank you so much. Kerry, how do you think you would have received these kinds of resources if they were offered to you when your family was living in poverty and other forms of distress?

KERRY HAWKINS: Yeah, I think you now that, Emi. When I was thinking about this question part of me was like, well, you know, when it your needs are so desperate and all you have is a resource, which is a bit of information, it is kind of like… I don't know.

I think for me what I would have seen and heard is partly myself reflected in it. There is nothing out there that speaks to me ever. And in that as well, I think, hopefully, some validation.

My experience was being an invalid mother all the time, every day. Whether it is the car you drive, the state of your house, because you get your children to school late and not in the right uniform or something is always a little bit awry.

And part of it is inevitable because you are always under resourced in this world and part of it is just that is what you internalise.

And I remembered once, a neighbour, who had been a single mother at one point made in off-the-cuff comment to me, having being a witness to some of our experiences, made a remark about, you are amazing. Something like that. It was really the only time I had ever had a single word about… you are incredible. You are amazing. I had never heard from myself, really. I had not heard it from any other part of my social environment.

And so, I think, maybe, resources like this might have A resonated with me and B provided me with validation about the reality of the challenges that we were under.

Just recognition of our experiences and potentially some hope.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you, Kerry. Really important to name the limitations of any written resource when families are facing structural oppression.

Zan, can you please talk a bit about the practitioner guides that we develop that sit alongside these resources?

ZAN MAEDER: I realise that before when I was speaking about the ways in which folks in work like mine can be agents of repression, I do not explicitly named the ways in which we can also be accomplices in resistance and realistically, we are often doing both at the same time.

But these guides are an invitation and I am guessing most of you are here in this webinar because you are also committed to being accomplices in resistance and doing all sorts of things in your own practice.

We also wanted to make sure that we had a resource for practitioners to take up these, the whole package of resources in a way that is in line with the intentions of the project. They include some of the background theory, the evidence, and relevant evidence. Relevant to the themes of the frameworks of the project.

They have two sets of questions. One set of questions are some suggested questions that the practitioner can ask families that they work with. After maybe reading a resource together or sharing it. And we really explicitly recommend that those are adapted to the cultural context you are working with, the age of the folks you are working with, you know the people better than we would.

They are just starting places for exploring resonance, and also, divergence, I suppose. What was it about the stories that they read that did not feel relevant to the experiences? How was their experience different?

Did it spark memories of the families was positive own responses to tough times? And also, kind of getting into conversations about their hard-won knowledge that could be shared and finally, thinking about impacts.

What difference does reading this resource make for them?

One of the intentions of the guide as well is to influence the way that we practitioners listening to the stories that families tell us, to train our ears, to always be paying attention to and curious about stories of suffering or injustice or oppression as well as stories of response and resistance.

So that we are always thinking about both of those things at the same time.

And we offer up a few different reflection questions for practitioners to examine our own practice. Having a think about who are the families that we support, and what do we know, and what might we not know about what they are up against.

How will be impacted by the resources? How might they shape our practice? Were any of our ideas or assumptions challenged by reading the resources? By the way, we would love to hear back from you about that. Feel free to send emails to Emerging Minds about those impacts.

Also thinking beyond those face-to-face conversations, if that is the nature of your work. There are people who from lots of different roles. Thinking about lots of structural barriers that might exist in the services we are working in and what might we do to reduce them.

Do we provide bus tickets or taxi fares? Do we know rigorously about all of the food services in our community? Etc etc.

What will make it possible for people to access our services?

And also, what are our responsibilities beyond our workplace to actually address the inequities that face so many families and kids?

As Vicki Reynolds says, so were not just bandaging people up and sending them back out into the world to hurt them.

Offerings about all sorts of places that can take you. And ideas, how you might share the resources as well in your work context.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you, Zan, for that description. How else do you think practitioners can leverage off the ideas in these resources?

ZAN MAEDER: I guess, continuing that thought. Might you be taking them up for the purpose of training. There can be something problematic about quote unquote case reviews but there are a multitude of stories that have been generously offered up in these resources that you can have all sorts of rigorous conversations and thinking about your work and practice. Perhaps there are places in your community where you know it would be beneficial to have printouts of the resources, hospital waiting rooms, childcare, where the community centres are, please print them out, take them there, that would be awesome.

We would have loved for these to be document so that the folks who read them can respond and add to them. Which wasn't tech possible at the present time. We were hoping that practitioners might play a role in continuing the ripples of collective lived experience knowledge sharing. And maybe there are ways that you can find for families that you work with to share their skills and knowledges.

And also, the reality is, as much as we, not me personally, but worked hard on the SEO and accessibility of these on the web there will be so many folks especially people in crisis who will not be able to find their way to these resources. Perhaps you can be the link. Those are a few different ideas.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you, Zan. And what about what kind of language would you use if you wanted to invite families to make their own contributions to these resources?

ZAN MAEDER: So this is the real speedy overview of ideas that really come from collective narrative practice which I can't do justice to in the time today but I do recommend checking out the work of David Denborough on the Dulwich Centre website but an experience is having people speak through us not to us in one of the simplest ways to start is by sharing the tips that folks share with you all the stories with other families who support, so meeting a family, you could say something like "I really think that there might be other families who would really appreciate hearing that idea about how you managed to keep yourself and your kids safe when you are homeless. Would you mind me sharing that if I think they might find it useful?"

So even then, whether you do have that opportunity to share, that in and of itself can be a really honouring response to what has been shared with you. I would suggest that where possible, try to use the exact words of families, if you're taking notes, that's great, and really resist the urge to paraphrase or interpret, even and especially from children's advice or stories. There's a couple of really good courses on the Emerging Minds website which are included in your extra links, engaging children, shrinking problems and engaging children. It provides all sorts of skills for how to have conversations with kids that uplift their knowledges and skills and perspectives on the problems they are facing so check those out if you want to.

If you do have an opportunity to share that story with another family, and is a possibility to hear from them about the impact it has had, take notes on that, share it back with the first family let them know that they have had an impact on someone else. You could do this in a creative way. A colleague of mine who is actually in those training videos, Carolyn, used to work in a primary school and she had a big tree up on the wall where kids, parents and carers who had come in and worked with her might stick up pictures, words or small stories on that tree, and others who came in could have a look and just see what resonated.

So you might be able to do something similarly start collecting more stories on a theme that is resonant for lots of folks that you work with. Perhaps one of our resources is really pertinent to the families that you see in your context or perhaps you are sparked to think about collecting stories around another theme, from the way that we've done these resources.

Could be similar to a word on a Post-it note or inviting families to draw, write something themselves. Just kind of always honouring families' own authorship and how they might want to be named or located or anonymous in those offerings of wisdom.

And, I guess, one final suggestion I might offer up is that if you are speaking with folks who have a lot to share, you might have conversations about avenues for lived experience work. Perhaps not even in a formal way. Perhaps it's just in parent groups they are a part of or as part of their school community or contacting an MP but if you did want to have conversations with them about lived experience work and them sharing their knowledges and skills, we also have a guide, again, links provided, called tips for getting involved in lived experience work, which has a lot of hard-won knowledge and that so there could be something that you offer up as a way of the uplifting folks sharing their skills and knowledges.

LYDIA TROWSE: So many great suggestions in that. Emi, what do you think about those ideas of practitioners seeking contributions? How do you think you and your family might have liked to have been asked when you are really in the thick of it to contribute your wisdom to other families?

EMI ARTEMIS: I think just like an invitation, that's really been said. Just kind of want to hear you could or should, those kind of ould words. They should be banned from the language in general! But like an invitation for you know, at the right time, I mean sometimes I wouldn't have had any space to hear anything apart from help, what I do. Just finding a way to let that family know that they are not alone and that without invalidating what the going to, you want to be That you don't say "This family has done this," In a way that invalidates. But as a way of just saying that other families have gone through what you've gone through and… What am I trying to say?

It's not like giving advice but just kind of validating the experiences. Essentially that is what it is. That other families have gone through what you've gone through, and there is a solution. There is a way out.

Something the resources show, I think, is that it's very individual, how you your path, and each of us do it in our own way and that comes out in the resources, that even our experiences might have been similar in the sense that they are all based around these social determinants that all-around social injustice, but the way we experienced and found our way out of it was very individual and unique.

So having that invitation to have a look at what other families have done and then to be able to say "Maybe you can find your own way out as well," whatever that pathway is. That would have been really wonderful.

LYDIA TROWSE: Well said, thank you so much. We have had some questions come through from the audience before the webinar, so thank you to everyone who sent those through. We will get to some of them shortly but I will let you know that the participants will be taking extra time to answer these questions after the webinar. John about how what we've been talking about here is different to strength-based practice?

ZAN MAEDER: I'm sure the others can speak to this too but when I think about strength, and thinking about who is it that's defining what is the strength? And a lot of really normative ideas can sneak in around that. I'm obviously talking from a practitioner perspective. So I don't think that my account or my ideas about what is a strength are actually relevant. I think that if folks are identifying strengths in our own experience, that can be really meaningful, but it's not actually for me to define what those are because… There's also a really strong cultural trend towards what can sometimes be described as weaponised positivity, and I think that that can be really hazardous in the space of working with families who are up against it.

Resilience is a useful concept in a lot of different circumstances but for me to define someone as being resilient is very totalising. It can be obscuring the hardness, the suffering, the feeling, the battle on a day-to-day basis to get through or to believe that you are a worthwhile person or parent and I think that can often do more harm than good, so really I guess another point being that when we talk about strengths in ways that are internal to a person, that can set people up to fail a little bit if the context changes.

Whatever it might be, courage or kindness whatever, becomes less available, and perhaps they might see that this strength in other things like fear or anger or whatever. So I guess I'm always trying to pay attention to my own assumptions about what other people's strengths are and being very careful not to define people by those, and instead, I think this a lot of other stuff that we can explore that is more rich, like what do people know, and what do people care about? Yes, we are all not going to act in line with our ethics all the time, especially when you're up against it. Often you are hugely separated from those.

It doesn't mean that we are still not in connection with them, finding a way that to them and finding small ways to live in line with them. And we can move closer or further away from what we know, what we are skilled at. We can re-remember things that once we knew before and have forgotten. So I guess personally, there's a lot of value in privileging fluidity and untangling ourselves from normative kind of universalising frameworks of strengths and weaknesses.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you. Kerry, a question that came through before the webinar. Can you explain how experiencing social inequality is bidirectional with mental illness?

KERRY HAWKINS: There's so much literature on this now. I mean really, who would have thought that threatening terrifying and unsafe circumstances would make you feel a little anxious or depressed? There was a report out from the United Nations just a couple of months ago interestingly talking about poverty and human rights and the impact of poverty on mental ill-health and something like three times the experiences that you would call anxiety and depression, low income, so I have questions about either the morality and the political nature of what because the mental health system in masking the context derived circumstances of what we call mental ill-health.

Through a lived experience lunch, but now through so much research, we know that the social determinants because what we call mental ill-health. We also know when you're paralysed by exhaustion, fear and dissociation and fresh experiences of distress, maybe functioning is not going to be optimal and so it can become a secular rippling effect, both for individuals but also into generationally as well.

For example, remember that one of our children and paralysed by fear that they have a genetic disorder that was going to be passed down to them and the lack of resources to be able to deal with any of these kinds of uncertainties or anxieties again just compounded, so when you are living in unsettled, threatening or unsafe environments, it's difficult to study, it is difficult to work, and so of course we are setting people up intergenerationally as well.

So it is such a huge reform of the mental health system that is required including the way that we conceptualise it, which then of course conceptualises how we respond to people's needs as well.

LYDIA TROWSE: You did a great job describing that in such a short amount of time, thank you. We had another question come through on talking to kids about homelessness. So we just like to point people to the resource talking to children about homelessness, which hopefully someone can pop in the chat there for you, and within that resource, there is a podcast called 'Talking to Your Children about Experiencing Family Homelessness' that contains some great tips about that. We had a lot of questions about practical support is coming through and we just want to flag that is a national organisation in these resources it wasn't possible to name all the appropriate local support spot where possible, we did link to the resources that we could, but they're not going to be relevant locally to everyone.

Perhaps we could end with Emi on a final word of caution for practitioners, taking care when supporting families to manage finances or budget for example?

EMI ARTEMIS: Before you give tips on budgeting, find out if there is actually any money to budget. Things if you don't have any money, you get paid on one day and an hour into that day, your money is all gone which is what happened to me most the time when I was living in poverty, there is literally no money to budget.

And being told "Have you tried doing this to budget," for one to set up a second bank account for your bills? Why don't you just put five dollars aside every week, and before you know it you've got all this money? It's not going to work and it's pretty insulting hearing that. So do some exploring first with that family.

LYDIA TROWSE: Thank you. Really great advice. We could keep going for much longer and we will in the extended Q&A but for now, we've reached the end of the webinar, so a huge thank you to you three and for the audience, everyone joining us, thank you. All the people behind the scenes, AIFS and the people who made the closed captions possible today. Don't forget to subscribe to the AIFS and Emerging Minds newsletters to be notified about the recording and remember the feedback survey in the chat and we look forward to joining you at the next webinar, 'How to build a culturally safe workplace with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff,' which is broadcasting in a couple of weeks time on 27 November. Thank you everyone.