6. The vision: Where do you want to be?
How do you develop and define a vision for your service? You are invited to work through the following process and consider the questions along the way:
Ask the miracle question!
Let’s imagine...you go to bed tonight and while you are asleep a miracle happens. When you wake up, your service is father-inclusive. When you turn up at work, what changes do you notice in terms of fathers’ involvement in your service?
Take a moment to read through the following scenario. Once you have read through it, go back and, using the spaces available, answer each of the questions. This exercise should take approximately 20 minutes.
Let’s imagine...
It is 2017 and your organisation has just been nominated for an international award for excellence in father-inclusive practice.
You are in the car on the way to the airport to collect the dignitary presenting you with the award at the gala event at Parliament House later that day. On the way your phone rings, it’s a journalist asking you why you won the award.
She asks, ‘Who helped you build your organisation into an award winning one?’
Then she asks you:
‘What do the fathers using your service say?’
‘What do the mothers say?’
‘How does it feel hearing these comments from parents using the service?’
Once you get off the phone you think about all the other things that have happened over the past decade. You and your colleagues took quite a few risks, some of them worked, others didn’t. However, some of the more creative ideas really helped.
Can you remember some of the more creative ideas that really helped improve accessibility for fathers and provide them with what they wanted?
When I look back over the last ten years, three things stand out.... (write these down)
- __________________________________________________________
- __________________________________________________________
- __________________________________________________________
Conversation box 3
Imagining that working with men is all about the relationship...
What would you do more of?
The following reflection highlights what many men think about as parents when they have a child with a disability, and may rarely express to other people:
‘The single greatest challenge I faced as a father to a child with a disability was trying to accept the reality that I cannot ‘fix’ the ‘problem’. All parents wish to shield their children from all harm in the world, but parents (and particularly fathers) feel like they have ‘failed’ to live up to this. The feeling is: ‘Not only does my child have a disability, but I’m useless, helpless, etc because I could not stop it and now I can’t do anything to fix it either’.’
‘There was nothing more painful in my life than watching my child have seizures in my arms and being completely helpless to do anything at all about them. It was not until I had professional counselling that I could focus on something other than blaming myself and acknowledge that my daughter wasn’t blaming me either, nor holding it against me, that these things were happening to her.’
Andrew