Recently, I was at a fundraising lunch for the Mirabel Foundation – an amazing organisation that supports children orphaned or abandoned by parental drug use, as well as their kinship carers – when I heard ‘Mirabel alumni’ Ashlee McNamara speak.
In front of hundreds of people, Ashlee talked so bravely, and honestly, with humour thrown in, about the astonishing resilience and love that saw her and her grandma, Marita, negotiate the unimaginable difficulties of Ashlee’s childhood.
I knew it was a story that the world should hear.
I reached out to one of the Nine newspaper group’s most talented and empathetic journalists, Melissa Fyfe, who did a predictably brilliant job of letting Marita and Ashlee explain their journey in their own words. Good Weekend ran the piece as a ‘The Two of Us‘ feature.
The story is here. (Hopefully it is not hidden behind a paywall for too many potential readers.)
The Mirabel Foundation has just celebrated 25 years of doing some of society’s most unglamorous, difficult but important work, to give emotional and practical support to kinship carer families and to strive to give ‘a childhood’ to the children left behind by parental drug use.
I love helping Mirabel out whenever I can.
NOISY BOY MEDIA 