About us

Imagine you’re meeting a 10 year old child in a hotel room who is being looked after by youth workers on shift..... When you get out of the lift and knock on the door, it’s answered by a 20 year old youth worker who isn’t expecting you because they weren’t told you would be coming. All you’ve been told is that this child has been through over 40 foster placements before this, and now there’s nowhere else for them to live because there are no carers available, or who can manage their aggressive and violent behaviour. How do you feel before you enter? You enter the room....you see a small child sitting on a couch in a hotel room, hood down over their eyes, about to meet another new person they don't know. How do you feel now? 

What does this child need? Is what they need any different to what any other child needs? No. So why do we tolerate this happening every day in our communities?  

All children need access to safe, predictable, and enduring relationships that protect them from harm, and in the case that harm has already occurred, that help them heal from it. Relationship Based Care (RBC) is a whole of system-based approach that makes the provision of these relationships the highest priority of any care system around a child.  

Real children need real relationships - connection to family, culture, and friends. We all know and accept this as truth. Children need to feel loved and cared for by people they can trust and who will remain there. They need to feel safe and accepted. How can they behave in safe ways if they don't feel safe? RBC has within it a knowledge that without these experiences of real relationships, children (and in particular Aboriginal children) will end up continuing to enter formal Out of Home Care (OOHC) at record rates, to experience abuse in care, be at much higher risk of  incarceration, poor health, poverty, and to have their own children taken from them.  

If a child grows up disconnected and ripped away from their family and culture,  this leaves them feeling painfully empty of a sense of belonging, acceptance, and a clear and strong identity. Too many children in our communities are growing up with this experience; in particular, far too many Aboriginal children, as evidenced by their known massive overrepresentation in Child Protection response and formal OOHC. This disconnection leaves children vulnerable to isolation, disconnection, and inability to participate in communities they feel belonging to.  

What would you do if you were in this situation? You would seek family and belonging wherever you could find it, even if where you find it isn’t safe. RBC seeks to make sure that a child who is living this kind of experience is not ever seen as ‘too hard’, ‘too risky’, or ‘damaged’. Instead they’re seen as needing safe, predictable, loving, and enduring people in their lives to help them heal from the trauma they have been through....before anything else.  

Imagine a system that instead of measuring amounts of risk as a first priority,  measures the quality of relational connection and how connected and supported a child feels; knowing that the more connected they feel, the less ‘at risk’ they are.  

RBC means that children can access a Child Connection System, rather than a Child Protection System. 

As articulated by the CARE Model developed by Cornell University, RBC defines real relationships for children as being made up of:  

- Belonging (to family and others)   

- Connection to significant people (preferably more than one)  

 - Having a meaningful role (brother, sister, daughter, son)  

 - Feeling and having connection to place, country, and community  

 - A sense of identity and culture  

 - A system of values (that helps guide and form the core of a stable and enduring sense of self)  

 - Reliable means of support (I know who has my back when I need it)  

  - Information and knowledge (to help make useful meaning about who I am, where I fit, and how I can live).