National Volunteers Week 2024 – “These panel meetings are my best Continuing Professional Development.”

This National Volunteers Week 2024 highlights one of our Adoption Panel Member’s, Pete.

 

Hi, my name is Pete Hall Jones.  We adopted our wonderful daughter, through YAA, in 2004.

 

I joined Panel simply to help more kids get loving forever families.

My experience as a teacher, headteacher and now as an education and leadership consultant working in Sub Sahara Africa and South East Asia has further privileged me to witness so many different ways of creating and supporting loving families.

 

I love being on the adoption panel.

I love the wide perspectives and insights, the expertise and experience of panel members and how these perspectives come together through rigorous, compassionate debate to make families for deserving kids and wonderful parents.

I rarely experience the high quality compassionate accuracy of panel conversations in any of my other professional discussions. It really does feel an honour and precious to be involved – and help in some smalls ways – to affirm parents for children to have their oh so deserved life long loving family.

 

Like many people I’ve spent a fair chunk of my life in meetings.  They’ve invariably felt like a good idea and often they have been useful.

Sitting in the adoption panel (meeting) is profoundly different (in a very good way) to my experience of many other meetings that I’ve sat in and indeed chaired.

The moral human responsibility of adoption panel energises and encourages me. 

Driven, like all panel members, by an innocently optimistic desire to help every child have a loving home and make more and more loving families demands grown-up, wise, informed – considered thought and action.

 

Every panel I have had the honour to sit on, has embodied this intellectual gravitas with earnest, objective debate swimming on a sea of compassion and wisdom, experience and professional parental love.

It’s truly an honour to have this shared responsibility to make families for children and adults alike and it’s an equal honour to listen and debate with such learned and experienced, theoretically sound and proactively honed panel members.

 

These panel meetings are my best Continuing Professional Development.

On panel I’m just a dad. A very proud dad of a remarkable young adopted daughter where my experiences of parenting are affirmed and valued by panel members who bring their own multi dimensional knowledge wisdom and experience in the service of children and family making.

To have parenting experience valued and affirmed, challenged by alternatives, informed by others life experiences and wisdom is a privilege.

I have learnt so much from panel. I have contributed what I can and in making these contributions I have felt seen and heard equally with others. 

Through expert chairing and facilitation, gentle challenges and the constructive sharing of alternative thoughts and ideas, time is given in each meeting to ensure that unlike many meetings ‘the sum of the total is greater than any one contribution’.

 

Panel meetings always, in my experience, thrive from the pursuit of consensus and clarity, agreement and consideration and the collective decision making by people from different walks of life, different experience, beliefs and knowledge all coming together to interrogate for meaning and appreciate peoples journeys to adoption and the life they offer to children.

As a result of these great constructive debates, scaffolded on shared values and the vision to make great families – at the end of each meeting that’s what we do – we help to make loving forever families.

We look from all sides, or at least as many as we can see and envisage, we tease and test for truth and bias, we respect and gently, constructively challenge with love and we help ensure that kids get parents to love them, adults get children to love for ever and loving families come together, supported by the YAA community.

 

I really do love being a small part of panel … it’s almost as much fun as being an adoptive parent. 

Peter with his daughter, 2024