Delivered by Maria Cassidy – Families and Communities Lead NWG

About Maria:

With a background in youth and community work for over 25 years, Maria is passionate about working with organisations to ensure that the experiences of families affected by exploitation are listened to and that their voices are heard. Working at NWG, Maria works alongside safeguarding partnerships and national organisations to assist them in creating a culture which values and recognises families as safeguarding partners. She is also instrumental in bringing areas together to share emerging practices about their work with families that others can learn from. Maria’s national work has included developing resources, briefing papers, workshops, benchmarking tools, videos, and training “Experts by Experience” which all include the voice of families with lived experience of exploitation.

Working alongside parents as safeguarding partners

NWG would like to thank the individuals and families who have shared their own experiences to help us produce this course. This course is designed to ensure that their voices are heard and used to inform and influence local and national practice.

Who should attend:

Colleagues who already have experience supporting and working with families affected by exploitation or are responsible for developing a culture of working alongside families affected by exploitation as a safeguarding partner rather than a generic parenting course.   

This session encourages attendees to recognise and understand the value of working alongside families as key safeguarding partners in preventing and responding to exploitation. Attendees will explore the impact exploitation has on the family and consider some of the systemic and cultural barriers that can make engagement between parents and practitioners more challenging.

The session will highlight local and national good practices and principles that can enable and encourage how we can better work alongside families and hear their voices. Attendees will be encouraged to reflect and share their practice examples and identify development opportunities.  

Session Aims and Objectives

*To be able to explain why families are an important safeguarding partner in how we prevent and respond to exploitation

*Explore in detail the impact that abuse by exploitation can have on the family and what they need from professionals to enable them to become a safeguarding partner

* Identify barriers to families being safeguarding partners and describe ways to overcome them

*Develop a personalised action plan to promote families as safeguarding partners based on key national principles