10 May 2016
For children and young people in care and the people who work directly with them this will mean a slightly different Charter and a completely new range of posters and booklets for teens and pre-teens.
For endorsed organisations it is the opportunity to renew their support for the Charter.
For Charter Champions it is the chance to renew their contact with the Guardian’s Office and ensure the young people they work with are up to speed on their rights and know how they can be supported to exercise them.
‘Throughout 2015 dozens of young people and many government and non-government organisations helped us make sure the text of the Charter reflected the needs of young people and that the way the rights were presented was clear and appealing,’ said Guardian Amanda Shaw.
‘Mostly the Charter still reflected the young people’s concerns with only a few tweaks to the wording but discussion about how to communicate was very animated and produced some creative ideas we will be following up on later,’ she said.
Designers Sue and Chris who created the poster and booklet artwork were directly involved with several of the consultations with young people.
‘As well as being a great experience, it was incredibly valuable to actually meet the young people we were designing for and to get their ideas in a completely unfiltered way,’ they said.
‘It kept the design process very real for us.’
Charter Coordinator, Nicole Pilkington was keen to reassure endorsed organisations that the process of renewing their endorsement would be simple and straightforward.
‘For those organisations for whom endorsement of the Charter is tied to their funding, we have been talking to government funding bodies to make sure there are no hiccups.
‘The revised Charter is very similar to the old one so we are sure there will be no need for organisational policy or procedure changes.
‘We will be contacting all endorsed agencies over the next few weeks to guide them through the re-endorsement process or they can go straight to the re-endorsement tool and get started now.
‘We will also be sending out sample packs of the new materials to residential care houses.
‘Whether organisations have had time to re-endorse or not, the redesigned Charter posters and booklets can now be ordered online and A4 versions can be downloaded in PDF from the resources page on our website.
‘If you have any queries about the Charter and re-endorsement, please contact me by email (Nicole.Pilkington@gcyp.sa.gov.au) or phone (8226 8570) during office hours,’ she said.
This item originally appeared in the May 2016 edition of the Guardian’s Newsletter.
