So let’s see – what might you find useful to know about me?

One of four children, raised in Australia by parents from very poor backgrounds with little formal education themselves, the first resilient move my mother made was to encourage our schooling. It’s true, I had to suffer the nuns but I got nudged onto a learning path that has stayed with me ever since.

So, when I was first introduced to the concept of resilience, I was keen to find out more. At that time, I was into my tenth year as Director of Amaze, an information and support charity for parents of children with special needs, recognised as an example of excellence and good practice. 

I’ve been working with parents and families for the past 20 years and am currently the Director of ART, Amaze’s research and training service. I wanted to make room for thinking about and applying resilience ideas, so I’m seconded to the University of Brighton to do just that.  A Visiting Fellow with the Faculty of Health and Social Science, I work closely with Angie and the School of Nursing and Midwifery, supporting the involvement of parents, developing and delivering training, hunting for money, and keeping Angie in reign.

I’m really interested in practitioner and parent resilience. My studies in community welfare, sociology, counselling, group work and research methods all inform my practice of course, but the thing that has really captured my attention with RT, is the way it mixes ideas from a range of sources and disciplines to find a way forward.

We all know that different strokes work for different folks but it’s more than this. Seems to me that if you want to position yourself to have an impact you first have to acknowledge and respect what’s happened in people’s lives. It’s the starting place for contextualising and politicising disadvantage and discrimination, finding strategies to challenge unfair systems and building healthy trusting relationships that support us to grow personal toolkits for negotiating life’s rocky terrain. So it calls on us to span a considerable range of skills.