“Nothing About Us, Without Us”: Celebrating Care Experienced Advocates Around the World
For World Care Day 2025 we’ve collaborated with Care experienced researchers and co-designers, care systems policy makers and academics from across the world to bring together a series of events to celebrate the impact of lived experienced advocacy on improving Care systems.
This festival of events is a collective effort and we encourage individuals, families and communities to celebrate children and young people who are living or have lived in alternative care environments. We urge government, community and research sectors around the world to promote opportunities for care experienced people to participate in decision-making that affects them across research, policy, practice and governance contexts.
Many care-experienced people have shared how negative care records impact their sense of self, how missing or destroyed records make it harder to remember their childhood and family history, and how poor records fail to hold institutions and individuals accountable. We know that recordkeeping affects how young people in care are involved in decisions about their lives. Care-experienced people’s participation in research creates different kinds of records that are also often deficit-focussed.
In this webinar, hear how Care experienced, First Nations and international perspectives on Care systems can help ensure that research and policy recommendations can be integrated into practice settings and that important policy reforms are not lost in implementation. It’s time to rethink how information about childhood alternative care is managed to better meet the needs of all stakeholders in complex Care eco-systems.
Our presenters are
- McCreary Centre Society Youth Indigenous Research Team and Youth Research Academy, Vancouver, Canada
- The Charter of Lifelong Rights in Records for non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australian Children and Young People in Care and Care Leavers, including Stolen Generations – Emeritus Professor Sue McKemmish, Dr Rebecca Lyons, Dr Jacinta Walsh Monash University
- “Meaningful conversations…”: Co-designing Real-time Rights-based Recordkeeping Governance – Dr Jade Purtell Monash University and Lara Gerrand Kids First Australia
Join The Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare for a special webinar celebrating and supporting young people in out-of-home care
Hosted by OPEN – Outcomes, Practice and Evidence Network, this session will highlight:
🔹 The power of lived experience in shaping better OOHC practices
🔹 Raising Expectations – supporting care-experienced young people in higher education
🔹 OPEN’s spotlight pages on OOHC and Trauma, offering key research and practice tools
Records that care can create ripples of change for individual children and young people in care throughout their lives, and support deep and lasting connections to families, communities and cultures.
This informal discussion around rights and social care records with Australian & UK recordkeeping researchers, care experienced advocates and colleagues across social care, archives, human rights, government and the community sector featured presentations from
- Augusta Itua, Legal Consultant at CoramBAAF, presented on her Churchill Fellowship research on access and support rights to children’s social care files.
- Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Shepherd, Dept of Information Studies, University College London (UCL) on the latest from the MIRRA project
Access the slides for ‘My lack of voice’: human-centred recordkeeping and the MIRRA project - Dr Martine Hawkes, Adjunct Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Child Protection, University of South Australia, on the Caring Records Project
Watch a powerful Panel Discussion by CREATE’s National Board of Action (Youth)! 🌟This panel made up of lived-experience CREATE Young Consultants, dives into the real impact of youth participation in decision-making – showing how young voices aren’t just heard but drive real change in the out-of-home care system. Don’t miss this inspiring conversation!
Real-time Rights-based Recordkeeping Governance is funded through an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant DP200100017. The Chief Investigators are Associate Professor Joanne Evans (Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University), Professor Moira Paterson (Faculty of Law, Monash University), Professor Melissa Castan (Faculty of Law & Castan Centre for Human Rights, Monash University), and Professor Elizabeth Shepherd (Department of Information Studies, University College London).
