Kinship Carers Victoria podcast series

Deep breathing and meditation can provide you with a sense of calm, peace and balance that can benefit your emotional wellbeing and overall health through reducing stress. The podcast features an interview with Eliza Terry, from YogaLiving. Eliza has been teaching Iyengar Yoga since 1998, and teaches mindfulness meditation, with a strong focus on breath work for relaxation. The podcast also includes interviews with two carers who share details of their own experiences with trying relaxation and breathing techniques.

There’s a lot of information currently available about how, what and when to eat, and some of it can be quite overwhelming and confusing.

In this podcast Kinship Carers Victoria speaks with clinical nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner Nikki Valentini, director of SuperNature Nutrition https://supernature.com.au/. Nikki explains how certain foods and nutrients have been shown to help us deal better with stress and anxiety while other types of foods and eating patterns have been linked to increases in these feelings - and even to other psychological issues and illness. The podcast also includes interviews with carers who share their relationship to food and some of their dietary patterns.

Carers often mention their isolation but many of them have not developed strategies or networks to assist them in overcoming these feelings.

This podcast - as part of Kinship Care Week 2022 - provides suggestions for kinship carers on how they can form meaningful connections with friends, family, neighbours and the community to help them support their own physical and psychological wellbeing.

In this podcast, KCV spoke to psychologist, lecturer and researcher Dr Melissa Weinberg, an Honorary Fellow from the Dept of Psychology at Deakin University with expertise in the science of wellbeing and resilience. Melissa speaks about the need for carers to monitor their own physical and emotional state and needs.

Director of Kinship Carers Victoria (KCV) Anne McLeish talks about the challenges faced by kinship carers during the COVID-19 lockdown and how they and the young people in their care have been coping.

In this podcast on sleep and wellbeing, KCV spoke to psychologist Dr Melissa Weinberg, Honorary Fellow from the Dept of Psychology at Deakin University. Dr Weinberg discusses the effects sleeping poorly or well can have on a person's physical and psychological health and suggests tips on how carers can improve their patterns of sleep and those of the children or young people in their care.

Dr Sanjiv Chopra is a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, a best-selling author and sought-after motivational speaker, who is often referred to as a ‘happiness guru’. In an episode of The Bucket Podcast (at thebucket.com) broadcast on 10 October 2019, Dr Chopra spoke about his book, The Two Most Important Days: How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Happy and Healthy Life. This KCV podcast draws both on the contents of his book and that Bucket Podcast to present evidence on how happiness can be a choice in our lives.

Kinship Carers Victoria recently released the eight report on their longitudinal study of kinship carer families. In this podcast, Director of KCV Anne McLeish discusses why the study was established as well as providing an analysis of the latest report findings, which show that, for the most part, kinship care arrangements for the families in the study continue to be stable.