Hello.

Some of you will know or know of me, but for those who do not, I am a local Clinical Psychologist, creator, and podcaster.

I have a thirty-one year association with The Department for Child Protection. This began in 1995, when I was fresh out of university and scored my first job at what was then known as the Elizabeth District Centre of the Department for Family and Community Services, or FACS for short. Although the travel was significant, I loved working there and recently spoke about some reasons why on Episode 48 of The Secure Start Podcast, with Dr Laura Steckley.

To paraphrase, I experienced the Elizabeth District Centre as a containing work environment. What I mean is that the environment, including the people there, the work arrangements I had, and the learning I achieved, coalesced to make the unbearable, bearable.

I remained at Elizabeth until 2000, when I moved to the Woodville District Centre.

Ultimately, I left the Department at the end of 2002, to expand my private practice. Nevertheless, I never really left, in my mind, and have continued to provide a psychology service to the Department to this day.

I continued to provide assessment services until 2008, and established the first psychology training clinics in late 2005 as a partnership arrangement between the University of South Australia and the Department. While I have rarely provided assessment services in the years since, I have maintained a significant workload of psychotherapy service provision.

In fact, my first referral in 1995 was a psychotherapy referral, and I have delivered psychotherapy to children and young people for whom DCP has authority to place almost continuously since that time – 31 years. As part of this service provision I have had significant contact and interactions with adult stakeholders in the lives of these children and young people, which has been formative to the development of therapeutic parenting programmes which have been delivered locally and internationally.

For example, The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care has been consistently delivered through the TUSLA (Child and Family Agency) Fostering Service in Donegal, Ireland, since 2016, and I recently conducted refresher training with my trained trainers in Ireland. My trainers also deliver my Connected Classrooms programme in local schools to complement the therapeutic work that is being done by foster parents. They also deliver my Responding Therapeutically to Complex and Challenging Behaviours programme to local foster carers.

A local example is the delivery of the Kinship CARE Programme here in South Australia between 2018 and 2020, and follow on delivery to the Martinthi Aboriginal Kinship Care Programme, between 2021 and 2024.

I have also written a couple of books and lots of articles about my work, which have been published internationally and are widely read.

Last year I started The Secure Start Podcast. For the first year I published an episode most weeks with subject matter experts in child protection, out of home care, and related endeavours, from Australia and overseas. In fact, I have had guests from the UK, Ireland, the USA, Portugal, Germany, India, and Sri Lanka, and the podcast is still going strong. This year I also took on the creation of therapeutic parenting and education apps using the AURA Model.

I still travel to the Port Pirie office of the Department each fortnight to deliver a psychotherapy clinic to children under Guardianship, and maintain my private practice base in Blackwood, Adelaide, at other times. I have been travelling to Port Pirie for more than five years and also delivered clinics in Kadina and Murray Bridge during that time.  I supervise practitioners and Service Owners in both the UK and Ireland, in the evenings, and deliver group supervision to a local social enterprise too.

I am always keen to meet people working in the sector here in South Australia and encourage you to drop me a line to say hello.

A final matter I would like to say is this. I have maintained tremendous respect for the work that you do and am an ally of the Department and its workforce. I have advocated for respect to be shown to you in diverse ways, from my writing to my public speaking and even in interactions with Ministerial staff. Nevertheless, you may not always feel respected. Let me say that disrespect of you can lead to disrespect by you, of you. This manifests in many ways, but especially in not prioritising your health and wellbeing.

Thanks for taking the time to (re)acquaint yourself with me. I look forward to interacting with and supporting your endeavours for many years to come.

Best wishes. Colby

Links:

The Secure Start Podcast: https://thesecurestartpodcast.com/

Secure Start: https://securestart.com.au/