Showing Up

SHOWING UP

The village is not a feeling.

There are phrases we use so often they begin to lose their edges. “It takes a village” is one of them. We say it when a baby is born, when a family is overwhelmed, when a school community rallies around someone in trouble. It sounds warm and reassuring. But a village is not a feeling. It is people doing things.

For Jo Efoti and her husband Bruno, that has included opening their home to children who could not safely live with their own families. Together, they have fostered 27 children while raising their own family. It is a number that is easy to turn into a headline and much harder to sit with as a lived reality: different children, different histories, different needs, arrivals and departures, routines rebuilt again and again.

Jo’s community work is visible in other places too. She and Bruno are registered counsellors, and together they established Tradies In Sight, built around practical, face-to-face support that feels more like community than a clinical doorway. Jo has also been part of Dubbo Cares Day, another local effort built around a deceptively simple premise: people need places where they can be seen before a crisis becomes the only thing anyone notices.

But one of the most important things about Jo’s story is that it did not begin when Social Gain put a microphone in front of her.

Long before the Festival, Jo and Lorna Brennan were already sitting alongside families through the School as Community Centre playgroup at Buninyong Public School. That matters. The Orana Woman is interested in the work people have been doing quietly for years — the relationships and habits of care that already exist before an event gives them a bigger room.

When Jo joined Taco’Bout, the conversation was not simply, “Why would someone foster?” It was about the village, and the responsibility the rest of us carry for children who are not ours.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART

There is a lot of territory between fostering and doing nothing.

The uncomfortable part is that most of us can find reasons to keep our distance. We have our own families to protect. We are busy. We do not want to interfere. We are wary of the teenager who is loud at the shops, the child who is always in trouble at school, the young person whose behaviour tells us to step away rather than look closer.

Sometimes those boundaries are necessary. Caring about a child does not mean ignoring safety, excusing harmful behaviour or assuming love alone can repair trauma. Foster care exists because some children cannot safely remain at home, and the work of caring for them sits inside a much larger child-protection system.

But there is a wide stretch of human territory between becoming a foster carer and doing nothing.

It can be knowing the names of the kids who live in your street. Saying hello. Being the adult at sport who notices when a young person has gone quiet. Making space for the child who does not arrive with the same confidence, clothes, lunch, family structure or social skills as everyone else. Supporting the carers who are doing the heavy lifting. Refusing to reduce a young person to the worst thing they have done.

BELONGING

Money matters. So does knowing you are welcome.

In January 2026, NSW increased its standard foster and kinship care allowance by 20 per cent — the first major increase in more than two decades. Money matters because care has real costs. But the harder part to fund is belonging.

Children learn very quickly where they are welcome, where they are merely tolerated and where adults have already decided who they are. That is why the question behind Jo’s story extends well beyond foster care.

Who made a difference to you when you were young?

There is a good chance the person you remember was not delivering a program. They were a teacher who looked twice. A neighbour who made room. A friend’s parent who kept feeding you. A coach. An aunt. A boss who gave you a first chance. Someone who behaved as though your presence mattered.

The village is made of those people.

Not everyone can foster. Not everyone should. But the rest of us are not excused from the work of creating a community in which young people can feel that they belong.

Showing up can be enormous. It can also be as small as not looking away.