Ten Doors Down by Tickner Robert;

Author:Tickner, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO010000, FAM000000, FAM004000, HIS054000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

There is a postscript to all of this for me. During my time as CEO of Red Cross, I became heavily involved in the support of a program called the Young Parents Program, which was designed specifically to support the needs of young women and men up to the age of 25 years, and which is still running today. Through the program, young parents are able to access the safety, security, and support they need to help them with parenting. The program overwhelmingly benefits young single female teenage parents, focusing on their empowerment and on increasing their capacity for education and employment. The program has been evaluated on numerous occasions, and during 2013–14, for example, 95 per cent of all participants, all of whom had entered the program because they risked having their child removed from their care, were able to ensure that they kept their children, through the parenting and essential life skills and attributes they learnt in the program.

Of course, I had both an emotional and an intellectual commitment to this work. At a major fundraiser for the program held at the Bondi Pavilion in 2013, soon after my mother’s death, I spoke out as an adopted person, urging public financial support for the program. My experience has been that in a large general audience of 200 or so people, there are likely to be at least a few people touched by adoption. Sure enough, at this function, after I had finished speaking publicly about my own adoption experience for the first time, a number of women unrelated to one another came forward to shed some tears and to thank me for the openness and honesty of my story. They all pleaded for support for the young mothers benefiting from the program. I have always been inspired by the young women participating in this and similar programs — by their determination to do the right thing by their kids and to seize new life opportunities, sometimes after having endured the school of hard knocks in their family and personal lives. In previous decades, those same inspiring young women would have had their children taken from them.

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