Yes, it’s a real flurry of activity all of a sudden!
Since the Yes at the panel last week (which has now been officially ratified by the local authority – woohoo!), I’ve dived into a frenzy of busyness. Continue reading
The Flurry
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Monthly Archives: June 2019
The one I can’t post…
I’m writing this now, around the end of March, sitting in my hotel room in Ethiopia, but I can’t post it yet. If things don’t go my way, I can’t post this at all, so you’ll never know anyway.
But here’s the thing.
I have a new potential adoption match, and it feels really different.
It’s strange because I have mostly been looking at boys so far, and this one is a girl. I’ve mostly been looking at older kids and she is quite a bit younger.
She is so unexpected, as she isn’t at all what I imagined, and yet, when they approached me with her profile, and I read it, something clicked.
I felt different about this kid to my previous potential matches – this one really does feel right, and it feels like this really is the kid for me. Continue reading
What if you’re the bully?
This week at my office we have been doing an awful lot of reflecting and navel-gazing, which any NGO worth it’s salt is very good at. We love lamenting and taking long hard looks at ourselves, it’s our favourite thing.
In the wake of various charity scandals and safeguarding failures and so on in the last 18 months, there is a lot of wondering how we can fix issues like “endemic bullying culture” etc that keep coming up.
We have all done the compulsory online training, attended the face to face sessions, seen the posters, listened to webinars and read the countless emails that have been sent. So the issue is clearly not one of awareness raising but of behaviour and culture change, which is so much harder to identify and address.
We all talk about collective responsibility for change, living our values, and changing our culture, but I am willing to bet there is not one single person out there who self-identifies as a bully. I don’t believe anyone reads about an organisation’s bullying culture and thinks “Oh yeah, they mean me, because I’m totally a bully”. Continue reading
Delegating Parental Responsibility
As the flurry of activity is starting to snowball, and I’m suddenly being sent document after document to read, review, sign, etc, I am learning some fascinating things. Also they sent me a provisional timetable to meet my (potential) daughter which is THE MOST EXCITING THING EVAAAAAR!!!! It’s all becoming suddenly very real!
One notable thing that I found really interesting was the list of delegated parental responsibilities – and specifically what will transfer to me and what will not during the placement process. Continue reading
Had we but world enough and time... 