Media Releases

PCA Families welcomes new CEO

01 July 2020

Permanent Care and Adoptive Families (PCA Families) is pleased to welcome new CEO, Lisa Milani, who has joined the organisation at a time when many families are experiencing stress due to the bushfires and now COVID-19.

Lisa is a social worker with an MBA and has worked in the children and families sector for the past 15 years. This includes direct service roles in Child Protection, adoption and permanent care. She has also undertaken senior leadership roles overseeing community services across the family services to out of home care continuum, including adoption and permanent care services. She has served as Principal Officer and Deputy Principal Officer of adoption (a guardianship role) for four years. Additionally, she has led a range of advocacy campaigns in the placement preservation, reunification, permanent care and adoption space, and more recently headed up the advocacy arm of a large not-for-profit.

What makes Lisa so passionate about permanent care and adoptive families?

“In my experience, permanent care and adoptive families are often a forgotten carer group who care for some of the most vulnerable children in our community. This has fuelled my passion for improving the lived experience of permanent care, including kinship care, and adoptive families,” says Lisa.

Particular areas of advocacy that Lisa has been involved in, include:

• Better availability of therapeutically grounded support to families to enable placement preservation and timely reunification of children to their parents.
• Timely permanency planning to reduce systemic harm to children.
• Modernisation of the Adoption Act due to a number of factors including discrimination against same sex couples and single people, and lack of provisions to adequately consider the best interests of children in decision-making.
• Broadening the use of the Concurrent Care program across the state for a very select group of children where there are strong, early indicators a long-term out of home care placement may be needed to prevent unnecessary placement changes.
• Greater availability of therapeutically grounded family contact services to support early reunification to birth family, and where this is not possible, the development of sustainable relationships between children, their birth family and the permanent family.
• For a standardised permanent care and adoption carer accreditation assessment framework across the state grounded in an evidence-based approach.

For media enquiries or to arrange an interview with PCA Families, please contact:

Phone: 03 9020 1833
Email: