Current Projects

Kinship Respite Care Scoping Project

PPSS is currently involved in the Kinship Respite Care Scoping Project. As part of a wider Consortium, partners are Anglicare Victoria, Good Shepherd, Berry Street, Mackillop Family Services, VACCA, Office of the Child Safety Commissioner, and LaTrobe University. The research involves interviewing program managers in DHS funded kinship care agencies who provide contracted case management, information and advice and family support services across the state of Victoria.

The scoping exercise covers the period since establishment of the kinship care model of in Victoria in March 2010. It aims to map respite care services currently being provided for kinship carers in Victoria and to develop preliminary best practice principles and models of service delivery. The report on this project will be released in February 2012.

The History of Adoption Project

The Search for Family: A Social and Political History of Adoption in Australia

A four-year national research project funded by the Australian Research Council

This national history of adoption in Australia seeks to discover the distinctive ways in which adoption has reflected and shaped family ideals within Australian settler society; to influence the making of future policy and practice on adoption; to bring into history the stories of people whose lives have been changed by adoption, in order to acknowledge that experience and to read it against policy change; and to assess and explain the historical outcomes of adoption in Australia, an enterprise significant both for academic knowledge, the making of policy and the understanding of the wider Australian community. http://arts.monash.edu.au/historyofadoption/