International Centre News August 2019

A warm welcome to our new members: Mark Dyson, Val Jefferies, Karen Butcher, Shirley Pang, Marie Russell, Colette Cummings.

Welcome to our August IC and TCJ newsletter. The International Centre is a free alliance of like-minded organisations and individuals who either practice or wish to learn about the role of therapeutic care – especially residential, foster care and adoption – for children, young people, their families and communities. We communicate with our member networks and share articles, information and news via ‘The Therapeutic Care Journal’ (The TCJ) which is published bi-monthly.

Save the date:

Book your tickets now

1.       Our 2019 Conference: ‘Trauma Informed Practice; what works with children and families?’ Woodbrooke Conference Centre, Birmingham, 24th and 25th September.

We have been busy here at the International Centre, working in partnership with IRCT – The Institute for Recovery from Childhood Trauma and Family for Every Child to bring you current perspectives on TIP (you can find more information and the booking form here). The two days offer experiential workshops on developing the use of narrative in recovery, along with presentations on the evidence base for practice.

2.       The Child Care History Network.

‘If you know your history then you know where you are coming from’ – Bob Marley.

We held our first meeting of the CCHN on June 4th at MB3. We are looking for new and younger practitioners to become members. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of Child Care History across our sector in order to learn from the achievements and difficulties of the past. If you interested in joining us, please email me.

 

TCJ news – In this month’s edition

We have published CCHN founder David Lane’s excellent paper from the day ‘The Importance of Child Care History‘. David brings his broad experience as a former residential care worker, Director of Children’s services and member of the Northern Ireland Inquiry into historical abuse, to reflect on issues of recording, involvement of service users, philosophies of child care and child care as a profession.

We publish a foundation degree assignment by Rita Baptista, a Therapeutic Care Practitioner at the Mulberry Bush on ‘the use of juggling as a therapeutic approach with traumatised children’.

Keith White offers his regular two articles, the first ‘these are the stairs where I was told I was going home’, is a moving account of the visit of a former resident at Millgrove looking back on his experiences from 50 years ago. The second ‘Exclusion and embrace’ is based around the book of the same name by Miroslav Volf (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996).

Angus Burnett publishes Part 3 of his adapted MA dissertation ‘a foreign correspondent’. This is an experiential account of developing leadership and understanding principles of task and organisation in a children’s therapeutic community.

We finish with Jen Galloway’s regular piece from the Planned Environment Therapy Archive at MB3: ‘Convicted felons as social therapists’, a paper written by Dennie Briggs in 1963. Dennie sadly died recently aged 92. He was influential across a broad range of therapeutic community activity both here in the UK and in the USA. We publish a brief note about his work.

Wishing all our readers and members a peaceful and restful summer.

John Diamond

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.