To foster – or not to foster
To really get s... done, it helps to be a little bit obsessed, and I hope Kerry Owen won’t mind me saying that she qualifies.
Children (in need; the welfare of) is Kerry’s obsession and she’s already committed numerous acts of kick-arsery. She founded the charity Feed The Need, delivering 68,000 hot lunches every winter to schools in some of Auckland’s poorest suburbs. She takes young people into the Feed The Need kitchens and teaches them work skills.
Plainly Kerry is a cyborg, because at home there’s no rest; she and her equally kick-arse husband Matthew have five children, two of whom they adopted. A while ago Kerry and Matthew applied to CYF to become foster parents, and have high praise for the process.
The Owens were approved and ready to take two siblings, before a whanau placement was found last minute – but Kerry says that’s a hard sell for people considering foster work.
"There are not many people willing to take two or more kids. People want to dip their toe in first and that can be overwhelming."
Why do so many people like the idea of fostering, but never do anything about it?
"I think they don’t realise there are options. You don’t have to give a home for life immediately, there’s emergency care, respite care. It’ll be people who’ve fostered for a while who will generally take on more than one child at a time."
In typical form, Kerry has decided to fix this herself. She’s launching GiveAHome.org, a way of making it easy for people to find what they need to know about fostering. She’s held her first free information evening and of the 60 people that came, four have signed up as carers. That’s at least four more children who’ll have a safe home.
CYF have said they’re keen to see her idea work.
"They told me they’d never before had someone call them and say, can I help get the message out?"