Meet the team

Lesley, Editorial & Production Officer - Web
Dinah, Editorial & Production Officer
Kathy, Administrative and Information Officer
Maria, Administrative Assistant
Emily, Deputy Editor
Isabelle, Editor
Patricia, Child Placement Consultant
Sessional Child Placement Consultants
Louise, Director of Child Placement Services

Editorial & Production Officer - Web

Lesley is busy a large part of each month booking in referrals to Be My Parent, both newspaper and website, and especially those which agencies have made directly using our online service. She edits or writes profiles of the children referred, working with agencies in the process. She is also responsible for ensuring that profiles are published on the web accurately, with the correct photographs, up-to-date information, and links to the relevant glossary terms. She also makes sure that the section of our website which advertises Events Near You is up to date, and looks after the Family profiles section for approved families waiting to be matched. If you’re not yet featured there, why not ask your social worker to contact Be My Parent? And while they are doing all of this, she is also taking calls from families enquiring about children or about the Be My Parent service, and from agencies wanting to refer children!

Dinah, Editorial & Production Officer - Newspaper

Like Lesley, Dinah is booking in referrals of children to Be My Parent, as well as editing and writing children’s profiles. She is also the expert on all things relating to the production of the Be My Parent newspaper! She’s constantly juggling with the newspaper page layout, trying to fit the all the children referred into each of the sections colour-coded by region, and choosing the right photograph for each profile. Dinah also makes sure that all the children are correctly featured in each issue, each with the right details and profiles. We know families find the website video clips of children really useful, and Dinah advises social workers on how to make the best use of video clips. Dinah takes hundreds of telephone enquiries every month and has a fan club of families and social workers, who are grateful for her calm and unflappable nature.

Kathy, Administrative and Information Officer

Kathy is on the front line taking calls from families – there are over 1,000 telephone enquiries every month – whether about a particular child they’ve seen in Be My Parent, or because they are experiencing difficulties accessing our website. She strives to deliver a great service to each caller, and has kept many adopters or foster carers going at times when they felt like giving up by dispensing words of encouragement and support. Kathy collates detailed placement statistics, which are very useful for agencies. She also monitors enquiries received for children and any match made through Be My Parent. When we find out about a placement, the whole office cheers, especially if the child has been waiting a long time or a large sibling group is going to be staying together. This makes all our jobs worthwhile. Part of Kathy’s role is to provide support to subscribers and helping them navigate and make the most of the website.

Maria, Administrative Assistant

Maria is on the phone most of the day, liaising with families and agencies. When you call to enquire about a child or group of brothers and sisters you’ve seen in Be My Parent, it is likely you’ll get through to Maria, so please have the code reference handy so she can find the details quickly for you! Maria follows up referrals to find out whether the child has been successfully placed with a permanent family, ensures that families using the CRB-area of the website have been satisfactorily police checked and sends out information packs. She works part of the week with Be My Parent and spends the rest providing support to the BAAF Southern England team.

Emily, Deputy Editor

Emily writes, edits and proofreads most of the profiles you see in Be My Parent, always watchful for maximum word allowance and what information will really make a child come alive on the page and website. She takes the text that agencies have sent us, from the sometimes sketchy to the often far too detailed, and turns it into well-structured and rounded profiles. Emily is also Be My Parent’s resident expert on SEO – what is SEO you ask? Well, it’s all about making sure that people can find us in Google or Yahoo if they’re looking for information on adoption or permanent fostering. That involves a lot of work on the website 'behind the scenes'… Emily also uses her background in writing and interviewing to develop exciting and informative News & Features articles, with lots of real life stories about people who have experienced adoption and permanent fostering.

Isabelle, Editor

Isabelle manages the editorial team and oversees all editorial and production work for Be My Parent, whether it be the newspaper, website, and all other publications such as fliers, posters and information packs. She makes all final checks to ensure that all the referred children are correctly featured in the newspaper and website, including the full and half-page profiles, which are individually designed. Isabelle plans, commissions and writes for News & Features pages so, if you have any suggestions of topics you would like to see covered, let her know! Be My Parent would not be what it is without our real-life stories of adoption and fostering. We’d love to hear from you with your story, so please get in touch! Isabelle also checks, converts and uploads all the video clips of the children you see on the website. Families have given great feedback on the video clips, as they feel that they better communicate the essence of a child, especially a child with special needs.

Patricia, Child Placement Consultant

Patricia is our in-house Child Placement Consultant and is a qualified social worker with over 20 years’ experience in social work. Her work includes ensuring that best practice is applied to everything that Be My Parent publishes, particularly the children’s profiles, so that each child featured has the best opportunity to receive appropriate enquiries and find a permanent family. In addition, she responds to adoption and fostering enquiries from social work agencies and families from all over the UK, and always finds time to patiently soothe anxious or distressed callers and offer proactive suggestions. Patricia also works with social work agencies and BAAF's media department to feature children needing permanent families in the wider media, particularly during National Adoption Week, BAAF’s annual campaign in November which aims to raise public awareness about adoption and encourage more people to consider adopting a child. Patricia also manages the adoption records for the British Adoption Project, a research based project which operated between 1965 and 1969, involving a small number of adoption agencies mainly in south-east England. It aimed to place 50-60 children, mainly babies of black African, Caribbean, Asian and mixed ethnicity, with adoptive families.

Sessional Child Placement Consultants

Be My Parent also employs sessional child placement consultants who come in when needed to help Patricia approve the profiles before publication. They are:

• Charmaine Miller
• Lois Williams
  

Louise, Director of Child Placement Services

Louise’s official title is Director of Child Placement Services so, as well as managing the Be My Parent team, she has a line management responsibility for the Adoption Register for England and Wales and the Independent Review Mechanism, sharing her working week between BAAF's Head Office in London, where the Be My Parent office is, and BAAF's Leeds office, where both the Register and IRM are located. She has a social work background and has extensive experience working in adoption and fostering for a number of different local authorities.

Don’t forget that the Be My Parent team is dedicated to solving your website issues so please don’t hesitate to call or email.

Last updated: 05 September 11

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