Take Two Berry Street is an intensive therapeutic service in Victoria, Australia for infants, children and adolescents who have experienced abuse and neglect. A significant proportion of the children are in out of home care which includes foster care, residential and kinship care. The Take Two program utilizes a range of relationally based intervention models tailored to the individual needs of children and their families/carers.  There is a strong focus on working with the system of care around the child in addition to individual child based interventions. Take Two is committed to working in partnership with other service providers at all levels, from direct service delivery through to overall program governance.

This presentation will focus on the Circle Program – a therapeutic approach to  foster care, developed in 2005  to address the increasing complexity of children coming into the out of home care system. Younger children were being placed in care with more complex needs, including children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) backgrounds. The Circle program represented a recognition of the challenges faced by carers, and the need for trauma informed care by all of those involved with the child. The majority of children in the program are experienced out of care for the first time.

Take Two has partnered with foster and residential care agencies to provide therapeutic consultation to the carers directly and the care team as a whole as key component of the CIRCLE program.

Key features of the Circle program include the primacy of the carer child relationship, a focus on skilled therapeutic parenting, a multidisciplinary care team, focused training and support for cares and others in the care team; and engaging the biological family. Quantitative outcome data and illustrative case studies will be presented to demonstrate the efficacy of this program in in enhancing placement stability.