Building a good community home for kids

A GROUP of indigenous women in Cape York are among the first in the country to take advantage of policies that encourage private companies to enter the business of foster care.

A GROUP of indigenous women in Cape York are among the first in the country to take advantage of policies that encourage private companies to enter the business of foster care.

Louise De Busch, 35, and her colleagues have for eight months been running a business that shelters Aboriginal children who might otherwise have ended up in institutions, or bouncing between foster homes.

The Queensland Department of Child Safety provides the company, known as Campfire, with about $5000 per child, per week, to enable it to provide boarding-style accommodation.

The children -- some are infants, some are teens -- live four to a house, with social workers on duty in eight-hour shifts around the clock. The children are provided with meals, including a healthy breakfast, and if they are enrolled in school they are driven there each day. They stay in touch with their parents, some of whom live nearby.

Ms De Busch said the $5000 might sound like a lot, "but we're not babysitting kids -- it covers the cost of everything, including all the counselling and support".

The aim is to keep the children in the boarding homes for many months, even years, meaning the cost could run into the millions.

However, the service is vastly cheaper than alternative models provided by the department, and, as Ms DeBusch says, it enables Aboriginal children to remain connected to their country. All the staff are indigenous.

The business plan was developed five years ago.

"I had three children living with me at the time, and over the years I would have had 20, and for other women in the community it was the same," Ms De Busch said. "Our houses were overcrowded. We had grandparents, mothers, aunts, all these people in poor health, and we had to take children in, or otherwise they get taken away."

Ms De Busch and her friends came up with the boarding home model of care. "The department was anxious, and I think that's why it took five years to get going," she said.

"There was an idea that you can't put Aboriginal children in a group house. You can't take them from their family. But the difference was, these are Aboriginal social workers, and the houses are in the community."

One of Ms De Busch's business partners, Conrad Yeatman, put up his farmhouse, in Yarrabah, as the first group home.

Ms De Busch's home in Gordonvale became the second. Campfire now has six houses -- one is exclusively for boys, one for girls, two cater for sibling groups, and there are homes for young children.

"And the beauty of it is we create eight positions (jobs) in the community, with each house," Ms De Busch said. "We are educating our own mob to be the youth workers."

In Queensland, people who work with children need what is known as a "blue card" (or police check), and some in the community believed they would not qualify.

"It's known our mob have traffic offences, and they go to jail for things that aren't related to children," she said.

"So we sorted that out ... and we found they were the best workers."

Ms de Busch said Campfire's greatest success so far was keeping two adolescent boys out of juvenile detention. "These boys had been moved something like 50 times," Ms de Busch said.

"They were on their last stretch -- if I can put it like that -- and we had to lobby the judge, and represent the children in court to give the judge a solution, instead of them going to Cleveland Detention Centre, could they be diverted to us.

"The department was just sick of looking at them, and we've had them for five months. They have not absconded. They are picking mangoes. They do a bit of cane planting. And they're talking to the young ones about what not to do."