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    • Unify Family Reunification Services

    Our aim is for children and young people to live safely in the care of their parents or families, whenever possible.

    Adelaide Hills

    Metropolitan Adelaide

    Unify aims for children and young people to live safely in the care of their parents or families, whenever possible.

    We work intensively with families who have been separated by the child protection system due to safety concerns.

    About our service

    We support parents to build deep understanding of themselves and their children without blame or shame.

    This approach allows parents to make genuine life changes to meet their children’s needs and keep them safe so they can come home and stay at home.

    We provide general and specialist reunification services that works with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families where:

    • children are subject to short-term care and protection arrangements; or
    • children or young people are subject to long-term care and protection orders and have not experienced permanency in care.

    We are based at Seaton, but most work will occur in the family home. Assistance is available for families across the Adelaide metropolitan area and Adelaide Hills.

    This service is funded by Department for Child Protection.

    Our supports

    Our supports include:

    We offer families a combination of practical parenting support, psycho-education and therapeutic attachment-focused interventions, with emphasis on intergenerational trauma.

    • We provide all services on voluntary basis, within a trusting professional relationship.
    • We avoid transferring families to new or different workers and services for each part of the intervention, wherever possible.
    • We use established and evidence-based models and frameworks including some that can be hard for families to access in the community.

    These include: Circle of Security, Marte Meo, The Garden, Narrative Exposure Therapy, Therapeutic Genogram, Adult Exploration of Attachment Interview (AEAI), and Parallel Parent Child Narrative (PPCN).

    Families can expect to have contact with their Unify worker 1-3 times per week, depending on what they need and what stage they are at on their reunification journey.

    The length of involvement with Unify is flexible according to families’ needs, but this is usually about 12 months.

    We support families to engage in the following unique and powerful therapeutic processes:

    Adult Exploration of Attachment Interview (AEAI)

    The AEAI helps parents explore the impact of their own experiences of being cared for on what is referred to as their inheritance map.

    This allows parents to identify parenting patterns that have been useful and others they wish to change.

    Parallel Parent Child Narrative (PPCN)

    PPCN is a story-telling process designed to heal the traumatic relationship ruptures experienced by many families in contact with the child protection system.

    Referrals

    Families must be referred by their Department for Child Protection (DCP) Case Manager. We cannot accept self-referrals or referrals for families who are not involved with DCP.

    The service is voluntary, so parents need to consent to working with Unify and becoming actively involved in the reunification process. We work side-by-side with families and DCP.

    Get in touch