Naarah Rodwell recently marked one year in the role of chief executive of CASPA, the Lismore-based children's residential and foster care provider. She spoke to the Lismore App this week about her journey, the big changes and rapid growth underway at CASPA and her tragic trial-by-fire during her first year in the top job.

I grew up in Alstonville in a very large family. I'm one of nine biological children and my parents were foster carers as well. I had lots of foster kids come live in our home when we were growing up, and some who were long term. I have a foster brother who, well, he's my brother now as adults.

Interestingly, my foster brother came into our lives from the North Coast Children's Home when my parents became his carers. I remember the day when we picked him up from the North Coast Children's Home, which is the site where CASPA has its administrative headquarters now.

Naarah Rodwell with some of her big family. PHOTO: Supplied.

I was just a very little girl at the time, but I remember driving up the driveway and being really intrigued about what happened in that building. How did these very unfortunate, disadvantaged children come to be here? Why were they there and why were we picking up this boy that I eventually ended up caring very deeply about as my brother?

When I've really reflected on why I got into this industry, I think it was that moment in time in my childhood where I realized that there were kids who were just so much worse off than I was. I think that really sparked a passion in me. Ever since then I've been a bit of an advocate, even throughout school and then post school. I always intended on working in the child protection or human services sector.

When I came back to this region in 2010 with my husband, I'd been working in the sector in Sydney for about seven or eight years. I needed a break so we bought a cafe in Ballina. I'd never run a cafe before and it was a steep learning curve but it was great fun.

Then around 2012 I realized my passion had returned and I needed to go back to contributing towards people who needed my advocacy and support. I told my husband and he said, you just go and do what you need to do. So I started working at CASPA.

The building that houses CASPA's administrative headquarters used to be the North Coast Children's Home. PHOTO: Supplied.

I soon saw that there were gaps in our service delivery and worked to bring in new programs. I have a real passion around the foster care space and in particular wanting to attract and recruit foster carers to care for young people with very complex needs. These are the young people that tend to end up in long-term residential care, which doesn't necessarily meet all of their needs. Certainly not in the long term.

It is very difficult when you've got your own family and your own life stresses to consider taking on a complex needs child or young person. But those kids are so deserving precisely because of how complex their needs are and there are so many gaps in the service system for them.

There is definitely much more happening now, with a lot of sector reform, but at the time they were too often in the too hard basket. There wasn't a lot of emphasis on the need to advocate for them and to find carers and also upskill and support carers to take on these kids.

My first real project for CASPA was bringing about a foster care program which provides 12 months of intensive training and then wraps very significant additional supports around them so they have access to a clinician and a professional development program in addition to mandatory training.

My focus on foster carers came from my experience in a home where there was foster care occurring and seeing the complete lack of support that was provided to my parents who were caring for teenagers with very complex needs who had experienced really disrupted childhoods and lots of adversity in their life.

The support is not actually for the child directly as much as it is for the carer because if you support the carer, they can support and nurture that child. They are the tool and the instrument for change.

It was a real journey for CASPA because in the past the organisation had just been a residential care provider and it was the first time it had done foster care. I think we’ve been doing really well in that area and we've drastically built on what it was back in 2012 to where we are now. It was my baby and I think that the concept of supporting carers has been adopted not just at CASPA but right across the state.

It's definitely been very rewarding seeing some of the outcomes that have been achieved for children and young people who otherwise would probably be in the too hard basket. These are kids that you see go through 10, 15, 20 placement breakdowns, different homes. Seeing some of these kids stabilize in one placement has been brilliant.

CASPA staff commemorate Reconciliation Day with a smoking ceremony. PHOTO: Supplied.

I was told by the CEO at the time - coming from the board - that CASPA needed to diversify and grow so over time I started the foster care program and then I some other fee for service programs and clinical-based work. My role grew and grew and grew and I ended up in the general manager position reporting to the CEO, but essentially with all of CASPA's programs under my leadership.

Then last July we had a change in management and movement in the executive space and with the board, and I was appointed CEO. So I've just completed my first 12 months as the CEO.

Reflecting on the last year that I've had, it's been a massive transition. A big journey. A lot has happened but above all it's been a year of tragedies.

About eight weeks after I started as CEO, a staff member died in a single vehicle car accident while she was working.

It was my responsibility to rock up to work the next day and face a workforce of 250 people who all knew her, who were all going to be deeply impacted. And then all the kids that knew her and looked up to her. Her nickname was Mama Max. That was really hard.

But I'm actually very grateful for the experience, not in the sense that I wanted something like that to happen to shape me, but it certainly has made me a better human being and it's definitely made me a far better leader than I possibly could have been.

Not long after the fatal car accident, one of our children in care passed away, a child that I knew well. I was in a very different role when he first came to CASPA and I'd worked with him and his family extensively.

When he died last year, it was devastating on a personal level and a professional level, in every sense of the word. I always thought that losing a child in my care would be the one thing I couldn’t cope with, that would make me quit. But what it actually did was inspire me to look deeper and further, to find out what could we have done differently. To try and work out what we could learn from tragedy.

I miss him every day and I grieve for my staff that have been deeply affected by it. There's nothing more you can say about it than the fact that it deeply affects people. And despite all our training, I'm proud of the fact that my staff are affected because it means that they're very humanly connected.

I think that was probably the steepest learning curve I could have had as a CEO coming in. But out of both those tragedies has been born a greater commitment and connectedness to the work that we're doing. We've learned how to do things in a really meaningful way, particularly with families.

CASPA staff during a training workshop. PHOTO: Supplied.

The family of a staff member that passed away was integral to our decision making and to how we did things beyond that event. Her family taught us so much about how to do things in a meaningful way. There's no book that I can read that will tell me what to do when a staff member dies. You need to talk to the families. You need to find out what their wishes are, what we can and can't do and what's important to them.

So when I reflect on the 12 months that we've had, what I've seen is a real shift in all of our leaders because we've all learned together collectively on the spot how to take adversity and lead people through it and how to, as an organization, recover, recuperate and become more resilient.

The other thing that has happened in the last 12 months is a real strengthening of the connection between the board and the organization. We've also got an incredibly dedicated chairperson now, who came in at the same time pretty much as me, who is a former crown prosecutor and who has a lifetime of incredibly valuable experience that he brings into his role.

Lismore Mayor Issac Smith presents the Outstanding Business Leader Award to Naarah Rodwell at the recent 2019 Lismore Business Awards. PHOTO: Supplied.

Looking to the future, we’re focusing on evidence-based practice. At the moment, we run some evidence based programs and then in its entirety, right across every program of CASPA we do evidence-informed work. So we've got a three-year plan that will see every piece of work that we do being evidence-based.

Meanwhile, the organisation and the board have identified early intervention as the area that we want to grow. We actually want to reduce the number of children in care. If you look at that from the perspective of our business model, that's where our funding comes from, so we're in a way talking about reducing in size but ultimately children do better at home, with their families.

So we want to be doing the funded work but also work that's beyond what's funded by the government by being able to operate as a charity. We're really driving this concept around "it takes a community to raise a child" and therefore the community needs to participate and give in order to help raise all children. That will enable us over the next few years to apply our evidence-based work and do more than what we're being funded to do because families need more than what is being funded by the government. That's where we're heading.

For information about how to become a foster parent and about CASPA, head to: https://www.caspa.asn.au/