Berry Street hosts Taiwanese delegation

A group of staff from Taiwan’s Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF) recently visited Melbourne to learn how child protection, trauma recovery and family violence support services are provided here.

Hosted by Berry Street, the group were interested in understanding more about Take Two’s trauma-informed mental health services. While here they met with other staff including from the Education First Youth Foyer in Shepparton, and attended the new Berry Street School campus in Narre Warren.

Formed in 1991, CWFL have offices and staff across Taiwan. They provide educational outreach, family mediation, childcare and adoption services as well as frontline support for people experiencing mental ill health, family violence, sexual assault, substance abuse, and child neglect and abuse.

Take Two Director, Dr Allison Cox said the relationship between Berry Street and CWLF is a terrific opportunity to share ideas and build international connections.

“CWLF originally got in touch a couple of years ago and wanted to know more about Take Two’s experiences using a couple of trauma-informed mental health modalities,” she said.

“Since then, we’ve had conversations about the assessment and intervention models they might want to invest in and about Take Two providing that training to them.”

“In Taiwan, they have taken a different approach to Victoria in that they have introduced mandatory reporting of family violence incidents. They were interested to learn more about the approach that has been implemented in Victoria of empowering and listening to victim-survivors in the context of risk assessment, service collaboration and embedding family violence services across the service system.”

“While CWLF have a lot of experience in working with individuals and families, they were keen to understand more about how we advocate for families with other agencies involved such as police, courts, child protection care teams and schools.”

“Earlier this year I was privileged to be invited to deliver the keynote address at their Trauma-Informed Care Practices conference. It was a fascinating experience. I was presenting online, so they needed to translate my visual presentation slides into Mandarin to show at the event, and they then translated live what I was saying. To further complicate it, they had to move the entire conference online at the last minute because of a typhoon.”

“I’m looking forward to further developing the relationship with CWLF because I think we both can learn from each other’s experiences and expertise.”

About Berry Street Take Two

We are a trauma-informed mental health service with 20 years’ experience working with infants, children, young people and families who have experienced complex trauma.
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