Where a child/young person is no longer in the care of their parents, the Kinship Care Program, together with Child Protection, tries to keep children within their extended family or within the child's support network.

Children are referred to the Kinship Care Program through the Department of Human Services Child Protection Southern Metropolitan Region. Usually the Department of Human Services will initially place a child in a kinship placement and OzChild can be asked to carefully assess their suitability and support needs to provide a long term or permanent placement for a child. At times OzChild can also be requested to provide a preliminary assessment for a kinship placement prior to a child being placed. A thorough assessment of the prospective carers can take up to three months, whereas a preliminary assessment can take four to six weeks.

Families may be assessed as requiring ongoing support in order for the child to live with them. This support is established to ensure that the best interests of the child are being met. There is also an emphasis in ensuring that children/young people and their carers are linked into community based support services. In addition the program facilitates support groups and aims to develop kinship carer training, both within groups and individually. The kinship program is a region wide service.

Information for Kinship Carers is available here.

New Kinship Care service

We are pleased to announce that OzChild has been successful in the round of tenders for the new Victorian Department of Human Services Kinship Care service in the Southern Region.

We are providers for the Frankston/Mornington and Inner Middle sub regions, with a program which is twice as large as that which we previously ran.

As the only provider of a discrete kinship care program in Victoria for the last eleven years, expansion of kinship care will benefit more children who can't live at home, and their families.

While the new service primarily supports the placement of children in the protective system, it also has some capacity to support grandparents and others in informal kinship arrangements.

Tannesha's story, about Kinship Care.

The Kinship Care program is currently located at our Dandenong Office.