Listening to Children, Strengthening Systems

[Music] Hello, my name is Clem Johnson. I'm head of Social Impact and shared value at LawFirm Mallisons. Welcome to Next, where we explore the intersection of business, law, community and society. Seeking out innovative ideas and organisations making our world more fair and sustainable. In today's rapidly changing world, businesses need to be future ready. We need to understand not just what's happening now, but what's coming next, what's around the corner. And that's why in each episode of Next, we sit down with leading thinkers, innovators, experts and change agents to unpack complex issues and explore emerging trends that are impacting businesses, communities, legal landscapes and society as a whole. It's also a chance to connect and to understand what drives leaders to be a force for good. In today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Katrina Lyons and partner at Mallisons, Emma Castello, about Act for Kids. Dr. Katrina Lyons is a CEO of Act for Kids and a registered psychologist with more than 20 years experience working across clinical practice, research, education and leadership roles across the community sector. She spent her career focused on early intervention and preventing child abuse and neglect and is driven by making sure children who've experienced trauma get the kind of support that helps them heal and thrive. Emma Castello is the partner in charge of our Brisbane office and a senior leader in the firm's corporate financial and commercial practice. She's also on the board of Act for Kids where she brings a strong focus on governance and long-term impact. Emma is really passionate about how firms can go beyond funding, using skills, leadership and networks to back organisations like Act for Kids and support better outcomes for children and families. Act for Kids is stepping in where it's needed most. Every year in Australia, hundreds of thousands of concerns are raised about children's safety and around 180,000 kids rely on child protection services, showing just how many families need support to stay safe and thrive. Welcome Dr. Katrina and Emma, thanks for joining us today. Dr. Katrina, can you tell us a bit about your path and what led you to Act for Kids? I've been at Act for Kids for 19 and a half years at the moment which it sounds so long and kind of terrifying, but I certainly didn't start as CEO. In fact, I started what I thought was a career in fashion design when I was in my teens and then did all sorts of things after that and ended up a psychologist. I was teaching at James Cook University in Cannes and grew a bit disaffected with academic life and looked for a role somewhere else. All of my teaching and research had been around children's development. Got a job at the abuse child trust in Cannes when we set up, we were setting up a brand new service up there in 2006 and I was the senior practitioner. I've been practicing in psychology as well as teaching at the university for quite a few years by then. Then I became a program manager in Cannes and then a job in the organisation which was still the abuse child trust came up in Brisbane. It was the executive manager of programmes and research and because I had a really strong background in research and research collaborations and publications I applied for the job and had a very scary interview with the whole board at that time. It was terrifying. I got that job and I moved to Brisbane and I was in that job which became the executive director of services for about 11 years. Then the role of CEO became available and I thought very long and hard about whether I wanted to apply for the job because I'd been around for so long by then and thought that the organisation potentially needed change but I eventually decided to apply and here I am. I've been in the CEO role for about six years. You must have seen so much change during your time in these roles and I'm really keen to learn more about that. Emma, we'd love to hear about your career and how your work for Act for Kids has come about. So I've been at Mullsons for over 20 years now so I would say a very linear career here but I've had a lot of materially absences from work as well which I think has kept me very fresh and engaged with work so I was always really excited to come back into the workforce. My role for Act for Kids came about about eight years ago I think when Buckley Cox had been on the board for many many years and was looking to resign or move it as a commitment else and so he was looking for someone to consider taking on a position so that's how I came to Act for Kids. I think it's been eight years now. I think it's eight years. Close to. Yeah, close to. So that was a very different role for me so a lot of my work is very adversarial and so I really enjoyed on the Act for Kids board just having a very different perspective and learning a lot about the organisation so very fascinating. How many maternity leaves? So three and each time quite different my first child I was committed to being a stay at home mum turns out I'm like a terrible cook and not great at home and then the second time was that much shorter maybe like six months and not even that long and then the last time was longer because I sort of knew at that stage I was probably my last child so I was trying to be as good as I could be at home. I think my kids would say they like me better when I'm working but they were likely to have more balance but I liked being at home. I just also really enjoyed coming back into the workforce and I did like you know a couple of days a week and my hours are pretty flexible and they stay flexible so I don't work long hours in the office I'm kind of like an eight to four each day at the most and then I go home and then I work later at nights but I have that sort of two or three hours is really important for me to have with the kids each day. Amazing well you're an amazing role model for people with kids or thinking about kids. Dr Katrina children and families are clearly at the heart of your work and we know that many young people who engage with services often feel unheard. How do you centre the voices of children and young people and allow what you hear to shape services, priorities and strategy? Well we actually think very carefully about this and I have to say over many years we've tried all sorts of things because therapists and family support practitioners and and we have residential support workers as well in some residential services they hear feedback from kids kind of in the moment but often that doesn't really then translate into service design or governance or necessarily get to people who are thinking about those things on the ground though day-to-day changes or practice changes for kids happen because of the feedback that they give their practitioners. So in the last five, six years we've developed an impact measurement framework that specifically involves asking children how they feel about our services what things are important to them whether they whether they are being heard and what they would like to see in our services and that's taken quite a few iterations to get to where it is today. We used to use just a general survey and still do use a general survey for some services that occurs at different points during engagement or and at closure for children and adult clients but we now have a system called social suite which is around our impact and we've created an impact measurement our put our impact measurement framework in there and so our purpose is to help keep kids safe heal from trauma and lead happy lives so we measure what kids think about being safe and healing the things that they would understand about healing and then about happy and we ask them specific questions a couple of times a year so that it's not that onerous and we then take that feedback we use it in our stakeholder communications the board receives that feedback every board meeting and the stakeholder advisory group sees the feedback and all the verbatim comments every meeting so then what kids say can can come up right to the governance level. That's fantastic. When you started to collect that sort of qualitative feedback from the children and families you work with did anything surprise you? No not really I mean overwhelmingly what people say is incredibly positive which always makes me feel so grateful people are so grateful but I feel grateful that they just are so accepting of our services and some of the things kids say you know make us giggle really because they you know they're focused on snacks really snacks and toys and I've got really good eyes ideas for snacks and toys and things to do during therapy, which makes us laugh, but it has made us review the snacks and the toys and think about it. And kids in residential care services, so we have six residential care houses in remote Aboriginal communities. And so these are children where culture is really important. And they tell us things about who in their family and where on country and those kinds of things. And so we make sure that's built in to their day-to-day care and interaction with family and kin and the community. Amazing. Can I ask you a bit more about those services? How do you run those and keep a sort of consistency, or are they really led by the communities in which they're placed? They are led by the communities. We are only in those communities and I'm not going to say which ones because they're confidential, they're residential care services for children in state care. The traditional owners in those Western Cape communities came to us 2007 and asked us to partner with them to deliver the services. And it was a big deal for the organisation at that time. We had never run any residential care services and we had never run any more since because it's not our core business, it's not a model that we would want to create more of. But in those communities, we've set up a whole program where local people, other main source, like they're the care support people in the community. It's very rare that we have outside people working in those houses. So they understand the community structure, the family structures. They can liase with families. They can speak language. A lot of kids English is a third, second or third language. That community system which has worked well since 2007, 2008 also comes with ups and downs because communities have conflict and we have to navigate all of that. But we also have a huge compliance component to running residential care services, massive compliance component which is understandable. They need safe, good care for children. So I understand the regulations but there's always this rub between culture and the way things are done in community and the resources. You don't have available in community and the compliance aspects. I'm sure Emma feels this on the board. You know most of the incidents we talk about in communities and trying to navigate that from a really culturally appropriate and safe and humble way can run a ground when you run into the regulations about standards, about home care and those kinds of things. It makes the tension very difficult, doesn't it, between the two because the services have to be provided but the regulatory oversight is so high for good reason but yes from a board perspective it does always feel like a very difficult proposition. Emma, Malacens has done a lot of pro bono work for active kids over the years. From your experience what role can pro bono play in helping children and families participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives and particularly in systems that can feel really complex and intimidating and as you've just said we're regulation can sometimes conflict with kind of what those families and young people are asking for. Yeah so we do at Malacens quite a bit of work for different organisations including active kids around regulations because they change so often so we do have a fairly broad programme across the firm as well of doing regulatory updates and reviews because the compliance framework is very high in onerous but I think our lawyers really enjoy doing the pro bono work so in our organisation it is sometimes difficult to find really good meaningful pro bono work to do so active kids and other organisations in which they're delivering services to children seem to be very popular with our lawyers and so they like doing that work. It always feels quite rewarding to be able to do something because our specialty as lawyers is so narrow it's so compliance it's not that broad so it is nice to be able to find opportunities in which we can do things and I'm just thinking of a team across Malacens it's a huge team that's run by the pro bono group in which they do these really big compliance reviews for organisations each year and the work I see from them is amazing but also the I feel like joy from the emails as well like it's a team that really enjoys working together and delivering a product. I like that I like the fact that we can help other people in a small way sometimes it's just very small but it's a good programme to have. Yeah I'm so under estimate the impact of that because we don't have expertise and it's often expensive you know we prioritize spending money on service delivery wherever we can but increasingly the compliance and regulatory and legislative imposition on our work has grown like it's grown exponentially in the last 10 years and so we've ended up having to create a team a compliant team risk team but that we still don't we don't have legal people in the team and so we really rely on the great advice we get from Malacens around all sorts of things you know from mundane things like leases which we you know your team probably go oh that's not very interesting to you know those very complex sets of requirements and regulations that we experience in four states I mean Queensland is in the process of implementing a reportable conduct scheme yes related to the child safe yes principles or standards every state has something different correct the principle the standards are different in Queensland from all of the other states and from the national principles we have had to respond to the department of justice because of youth justice programs at funded programs child safety child safety funded programs and now the Queensland Family and Child Commission is implementing the reportable conduct scheme and for each of those different departments in Queensland we've had to do a self assessment which has taken our compliance team me and other people are probably a week of our time each time so I'm currently having a bit of a meaningful conversation with the Queensland Family and Child Commission about what that costs not for profit organisations at the cost of delivering services and high quality services and why can't they just all talk to each other and have one self assessment and one regulatory oversight but each department in Queensland their lawyers go well that doesn't cover our responsibility so no they have to do it for us as well and they're all different so it's not like you can just do one so they pass it around no so you know pro bono help from Mallison's is is incredibly important for us because you know we push back on these things we're not sure about what is you know possible and what's not possible and we find it so valuable well we definitely like helping with that kind of work it is a good point though around this regulatory red tape and having to do the same thing again and how much it costs not for profits and I think that's one of the things I've been stuck with on the board by how much work goes into complying and just responding to government when actually that work could be picked up and used in government to avoid creating more work for you and your team it does seem like there's a lot of streamlining that could be done there but not just in this space that probably across many different areas and it's not funded no it's not funded no expect you to take it out of block funding which is stretched to the absolute limit providing services and so that's you know we as you would remember a couple of years ago I asked our director of compliance and risk to estimate what compliance for service delivery compliance not lease compliance not not accounting compliance none of that costs us annually and it would be nearly a million dollars yeah right and that's a big spent that three people on a team working full time plus my time because I'm the legal nominee for our residential care services and a whole host of other things and all the fees for audits we have multiple audits annually so it's yeah it's very expensive as it was surprised by the what it is anyway that's one for our audit colleagues yeah yeah yeah maybe this speaks to the next question but Dr. Katrina Queensland's trauma strategy highlights collaboration between government community organizations and border society at Millicons we know we can't make change alone which is why we partner with organizations like Act for Kids recognizing that around one in four Australian children experience abuse or neglect and that no single sector can respond alone how do you see the role of business fitting into a genuine whole of community approach this is something that I talk about a lot because you know that saying it takes a village to raise a child is is completely true children you know can't thrive unless all sectors of our community are focused on their wellbeing And so, you know, flipping it from a trauma perspective, if we think about children's well-being, we all should be focused on that because they literally are our future. And we focus on very vulnerable children who have experienced trauma from abuse, neglect, and violence. And so they need everybody to be kind of on their side. So we have partnerships across corporate relationships, donor relationships, with schools, with health services, with the therapy within the therapy and the family support, many, many other agencies. And so we work within an ecological model. And that ecology is all of the people around the child and the systems around the child, like education and health. But around that, the community and how everyone can play part. And what we do to generate that community around children, for corporates and other stakeholders is to advocate. So we do a lot of work in advocacy. We do advocacy campaigns. One pillar in our impact strategy, which is our strategic plan, is around advocacy. And what difference we can create for children from a systemic perspective, from regulation change and legislative change, and from attitude change in Australia, about how we think about children and children's issues and the things children tell us. And so corporate partners can play a huge role in getting behind our advocacy in particular. Absolutely. I think advocacy starts with understanding. And we know when we work in a big organisation that some people will understand these issues, they have had experience with these issues. And many people don't and won't, but do want to learn. So we take that role of sort of educating and bring our people along the journey with you, really seriously, because we think that that can make your campaign stronger. And as stronger as a community together. Thank you. Emma, working in trauma exposed environments, or directly with organisations like Act for Kids, can take a toll on people. Emma governance and leadership perspective, what practices best protect staff well-being and help to guard against things like FI Careers trauma? Well, I'm hoping for most of our staff who have involved with Act for Kids, that's not too traumatic, but I think as you said before, like if someone has had a traumatic experience before in their childhood, it might be. We do have very broad, precarious trauma training programmes at Melisons. And so some of the work that I've been involved in before, I did a very long, real commission into defence and veteran suicide, which was actually very traumatic for most of our team. We had 30 or 40 people working there at any given time, and they were exposed to material that I would say was deeply traumatic, including to individuals. And so we have, as a firm, developed a pretty comprehensive programme in relation to making sure people are educated and supported in those types of processes. So I think we take that very seriously. I've learnt a lot about precarious trauma and trauma-informed approaches and supporting people. I think the very first commission I did many years ago, a long time ago, I wasn't quite as aware of those practices, but certainly the Civil side role commission made that very apparent. And I was struck by how impacted our people were on a niggivin day, particularly during hearing. We, from a government perspective, take it very seriously. And I think a lot of my team members would sometimes get quite frustrated with the number of phone calls they would receive from the team, but it was, it's a good programme. Absolutely. It's developing a lot as well, I think. So it's an interesting space. Yeah, I think increasingly we're getting better at understanding how to make how people feel safe doing the work that we ask them to do. And as we said earlier, people get a lot out of working on, you know, matters for organisations like Act for Kids. So we want them to be able to participate and also feel safe and good in that work. I think so. And I think as a group of lawyers, we're getting better at talking about those kinds of feelings. So when I first started, no one would talk about feelings in law. No one would talk about over being overwhelmed or being burnt out. Whereas now, I think our lawyers and team are getting much better at identifying. And hopefully as leaders we're getting better at listening to and identifying a lot of that as well. Dr. Katrina, trauma-informed care is often described as a mindset, but in practice it really requires deep organisational commitment. What does it look like to run an entire organisation through your leadership, across your staff, embedded in systems and of course through partnerships in a trauma-informed way? It's basically our DNA at Act for Kids. I certainly wouldn't call it a mindset. It's deliberate and intentional and evidence-based because there's no decades of evidence now about complex trauma and the impact on people. And so from a therapeutic or intervention sense, the things we do are designed very intentionally as evidence-based programmes. And the interventions will depend on the age of the child or whether they're an adult, the type of trauma they've experienced, the setting for the intervention. So our service design is actually quite straightforward because we base it on research evidence about what works. And as Emma was saying, our workforce are exposed to all of these stories from children and what children have experienced. Most of the adults we work with in the family support services, so those are services where families are referred because children are at risk of harm. These have very complex problems, drug and alcohol problems, severe domestic violence, about 80% of our referrals are for domestic violence, mental health problems. Almost all of those parents have their own trauma histories. And many of our team members have their own trauma histories, which is why they're really drawn to this work. They want to actually make children's lives better. So all of our people and culture processes, all of our environments are designed with the idea of being calming, non-triggering, welcoming. It certainly isn't a mindset, it's deliberate. And we get a lot of feedback from staff, which is great about how to improve that. So we do, we ask staff quite regularly, they know that they can give feedback about particularly environmental things because they can be the really triggering thing. So when people are sitting in really noisy environments and they've just been with a child who's experienced awful things and the child's been talking about them and they've got to come back to a really noisy environment. So all of our centres have a space where our team members can go and be quiet and just kind of regroup and get back together emotionally themselves and supervision is a huge part of it. Wherever possible and resources allow separate clinical supervision from line management supervision. So there is a space to talk about what's happening with clients and there is a space to talk about what's happening with me. And so we try and do that for all frontline staff so that they do have a dedicated space to talk about their own, you know, it's not just performance but how the work's impacting them. So the expectation that line managers will ask people, we are investing in an organisational wide trauma-informed system or it's like a culture system which is evidence-based and we'll be implementing that from June, July this year so that we have a shared language for all team members about how we treat each other, how we respect each other, you know, how we do things basically. Sounds fantastic. And this is a question for both of you. We know that funding models and cycles can be quite short but the work that you do, obviously you're collecting evidence all the time and change does take time and it also takes stability. How do you make the case for slower and longer term approaches and work with your funders to better understand how you're trying to achieve change together? I always find the funding model which is quite short term for some of the programmes quite challenging from a board perspective because it does seem to me to be very just sort of short sort of year one to two programmes and it is a long term change that's needed. I understand that's the way it's done but it would be nice sometimes I think to have that longer certainty but some of our partners like sponsors provide good funding I think that gives more certainty so I enjoy their participation because it does feel more definite as opposed to being at the Whom of Government which makes me a little bit nervous. In Queensland the majority of our funded services are three to five years and that's a lot better than it used to be, it used to be rolling every year. year. A year is not enough time for many families with very complex problems or children who have experienced complex trauma or who are living in violent environments to build the skills and capabilities to be able to cope with the emotions and heal from whatever the trauma is that they've experienced. So there is always that conflict, but you know that rub between funding versus what what we know works for people. We have contracts with donors for the kinds of services that we deliver. They're legal contracts, they're written up by their lawyers, we often get malice and suggest their contracts. We have performance indicators and we have to acquit them, we acquit something like 70 different funding agreements and contracts every quarter, which is enormous and a huge job for our team. And each one of those has performance indicators to it. So there's just this constant conversations that I have to have and our leaders have to have with donors and stakeholders and the government about what people need because a lot of the funding models can be detrimental to long-term outcomes because you pull away just at the point where people are ready to actually receive some help that makes a big difference to them. So it can be really tricky and it's a lot of the conversations that I have with philanthropists and governments and all sorts of stakeholders. I like that comment about throughput because to some extent it's not about throughput is it at all. It's so bespoke a lot of these services and if you do get in a trauma-informed way it has to be bespoke that to some extent that the less people you help in a really meaningful way might actually be more beneficial to them. Particularly if you know that the change is going to stick long-term and that you're building resilience and skills in people to be able to manage whatever happens in the future because that's when you're vulnerable and you've experienced trauma. If something negative happens in your life you have fewer skills and fewer support networks to be able to cope with that and so people end up in a crisis situation which is a mess and really impacts kids. So our goal is to empower both children and adults with those skills and confidence and capability so that when the inevitably negative thing happens in your life because it happens to all of us you can move forward, you're not stuck and your kids aren't at risk and that all takes time so to build that skills and confidence if nobody's ever believed in you, nobody's ever given you the time, people you haven't gone to school, your whole life, your struggle, reading and writing all those kinds of things which are the many of the families that we work with it takes time to do that and so when you know there's a requirement to see X number of clients so all of our government contracts have output measures some of them have very rudimentary outcome measures. We independently of that as I said have our impact framework where we're looking at outcomes so we want to hear from the people we work with whether the things that they think are important have actually changed for the better in their lives. I think that's another really interesting point about the trauma like when you maybe a child first comes to act for kids and you're addressing the sort of immediate issue it could be a very long period of time before they might need more help but at some point there will be something that happens in their life along their journey in which they will need continuing help. It's not luck just to fix and forget it's actually a long term support program that's needed. No I think that's actually a really good point people think therapy fixes the kids. So you know if the child has experience really significant trauma their development is impacted so they may have speech and language problems they may have motor problems sensory integration problems and certainly emotional and social problems and those things are the emotional and social problems are the things that people wouldn't say are trauma symptoms but we have multi-disciplinary teams so speech pathologist occupational therapist psychologist social workers because children's development is impacted as a whole. So many children refer to us have very poor language skills and very poor comprehension skills because that's the kind of like the canary in the coal mine part of your brain that doesn't develop and there are critical periods in brain development. And so the first thing may be speech therapy for six plus months or more to be able to allow the child to communicate with the people around them and their therapist before psychology can start and you might be able to do the occupational therapy around sensory integration and regulation of emotions and that arousal levels so anxiety and arousal levels so that might be able to happen at the same time is speech therapy but you know if you have a three year old they have a very short attention span you can't just overwhelm them with multiple lots of therapy all the time so all of that takes time before you even get to the psychological work where you can help children attach some meaning to what's happened to them in a positive way that allows them to reframe things across their life so they don't always feel like a victim and always lack the skills to cope when something happens again. That's absolutely brilliant to learn about I think we're all pleased that the days are gone where funders just wanted to see a straight line to a positive outcome and maybe that is indicated by educational achievement or job readiness and so it's excellent to say that you're really centering sort of what is success for that individual child what change do they want to see what's possible for them and what are the various interventions that are going to make a difference and not expecting that change to happen overnight obviously you've done some great work with many funders to understand that and hopefully they are being flexible and on that journey with you. Not all of them but certainly over my time at Active Kids that has improved because if you ask kids they'll often tell you they want to have a friend yeah like they have no friends yeah that so they their communication skills are so poor and their behavior because they're so heightened in class they have anti social behaviors and they don't have a friend yeah so if at the end of therapy a child says I have a friend and I can now talk to mummy about blah blah blah or my foster care or whomever that is success for that child because they've stayed at school and they have a friend. It's pretty simple for most kids and toys. Absolutely I don't underestimate the impact that you have then on those children's carers because they're you know just seeing progress and a child you know gaining skills and confidence to be able to stay in school and navigate school I'm sure makes an enormous difference for them and their stress levels as well. I just want to ask about communication so it's so central to raising awareness and sustaining public and political attention and it can be hard on these tough issues how you talk about these issues with respect to the people that you work with. What approaches have you found are the most effective in engaging communities telling the story of act for kids with integrity and keeping people connected to the cause. That's really evolved over time like everything I think there's a you know we're talking about change over time this morning we used to talk about the really negative experiences of abuse and neglect we would have very dark images of sad children and so it would be a really negative frame because what we believed was that people would be emotionally engaged with that and that's true but what research has shown very innovative social research that's come out of an organisation called the Frameworks Institute in the US which I've been involved with over the last 10 years or so looking at how you how you talk about or frame wicked problems so child abuse is a wicked problem domestic violence there's social problems that nobody knows how to fix really but how you talk about it makes a real difference to engaging the wider public changing attitudes gaining support and so if you frame things really negatively like that people go oh my god that's awful there's so many kids I can't do anything about it and they actually disengage over the about the last five or six years we've we've really changed the way we communicate about the issue and focus on the positive outcomes and what all children need to thrive because everybody can understand what children need to thrive and every body can understand and relate to the fact that all families have something that happens maybe once maybe multiple times that is really traumatic and stressful. And. and distressing and some families can bounce back from that because they have a great support network. Other families don't. And so we try and frame things very differently to engage people to understand that what they're doing can help. And then we say, you know, this is what you can do to help and give people some way of supporting. It might be through volunteering or pro bono support or dollars that help with therapy hours or capability internally. And so that is gaining traction across the community services and child youth and family sectors. You know, I'm working in a number of alliances that are partnering with the Frameworks Institute here in Australia to change the narrative about children, particularly the early years. Because in Australia, we actually don't value children. They are not prominent in legislation or decision making in any jurisdiction. They, we don't have ministers for children or we don't have child wellbeing frameworks. Every state does something different. They're not held to account. Other countries have really turned that around like Scotland and Canada and will have long term better outcomes for all citizens. But Australia does not have that. And so Frameworks Institute is working with a number of organisations, including Act for Kids, looking at how we can change the narrative so that people understand what children need to thrive. So communicate, you know, we take communication very seriously. As I said, part of our impact strategies around advocacy. So thinking about how we speak about trauma and what happens to kids and what happens in families in a respectful way is really important. And one of the things that I say to people is every family experience is something. You know, my family, Emma's family, every family. And but for the grace of God, you know, we're more different parts. And it's about the support you have or you don't have. Yeah, we're all connected and we're not as different as perhaps sometimes we think. Emma, as we mark our 25 years of Malacens in the community, what makes you most proud of our programme and the role firms like ours can play alongside community organisations? I'm genuinely very proud that our firm has engaged so much with this programme. Across the firm, ever since I've been here, there has been this great sense of people at Malacens participating and really loving being involved. So I'm proud of that because I think it's genuine. People do not expect anything in return. They're actually just looking for opportunities to give and to help other people. And I think if you can help one person, that's an amazing thing. You know, we've got partners around the firm who every year give up their time to manage these programmes and people. And I think it's something to be really proud of. So we're going to continue doing it. Hopefully more and more people will get involved. But I love seeing the level of engagement around this programme. Absolutely. It's part of who we've always been and no doubt always will be a big part of the firm. Is there anything else that you'd like to add or leave listeners with today? Any sort of lasting comments about your work or the work that we do together? One of the things that is unusual for a not-for-profit organisation that advocates has that I think is very special and so supportive and important in the work we do is the longevity of relationships we have. So the longevity with the relationship with Malacens and some other corporate partners. And that's actually not normal for not-for-profit organisations. And so, you know, I'm really proud that over years of people working within this organisation and with Malacens of thinking about the relationship as super important and ensuring that it doesn't fall away. And, you know, the outcomes for children and families over that period of time has been significant. So, you know, we work with some nearly 40,000 people a year. So when you, you know, talking about helping one person, the leverage that you help up us with is tens of thousands of people every year. And of that there's about 23,000 kids. That is really special. That longevity, sticking with the not-for-profit, supporting them, helping when they're growing, helping when times are bad. You know, COVID was a situation where we just had to lean on a lot of support from people. So having that support as a community is absolutely incredibly important. I would just say to our people, look for opportunities to get involved in these programmes, giving just a small amount of time can make a big difference at the other end. So keep engaging. Absolutely. From this conversation, I think there's three ways people can get involved. They can volunteer, they can do some pro bono work, they can learn about what act for kids does and think about the way that we can make our communities safer and better for all children. Thank you both so much for joining us. It's been an incredibly thoughtful and generous conversation. Thank you, Quim. Thank you for having us. That brings us to the end of this episode of Next, Malacen's Responsible Business Podcast Series. If you're loving this podcast, then leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It'll really help get our show out there. Please be sure to subscribe to Next Wherever You Get Your Podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Thank you to our incredible guests for sharing their expertise and perspectives. Thank you to our executive producer and editor, Peria Tahazadeh and our wonderful Tanya WinLaw, as well as our co-producers, Elise Perry and myself, Clem Johnson. We encourage you to continue the conversation online and share your thoughts or questions with us via [email protected]. Remember, the future is not something that happens to us. It's something we create. By staying informed, embracing innovation and acting with purpose, we can shape a better tomorrow. We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, as well as the Turbul and Yagora Nations, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and record on, and pay our respects to the elders both past and present. [Music]