 Next, we have Alison Hassell from the Research School of Psychology in the ANU College of Health and Medicine and the title of her three-minute thesis tonight is Fostering Kinship Connections. Alex is in out-of-home care, where children are removed from their parents for concerns like abuse and neglect. Alex is just one of 46,000 Australian children who are 16 times more likely to be involved with the youth justice system, up to four times more likely to die by suicide and 35 times as likely to experience homelessness. How did you feel as a child when you first spent time away from a parent, like on school camp? For Alex, this separation is not just one week, it is prolonged and traumatic. Most children like Alex, living kinship care with family like a grandparent, are in foster care with an unknown caregiver. We know that overall kinship care promotes better well-being and a more stable home than foster care, but we are uncertain why. Well, what keeps trees grounding the storm? Their roots. When children are placed in care, they are ripped from familiar roots. These separations disproportionately harm Indigenous children. However, there is an under-examined hypothesis that kinship care nourishes connections to family, cultural and community roots. This hypothesis could hold the key to why kids in kinship care might do better and is why Australian policy values placement with kinship over foster caregivers. But services can fail to adequately address the challenges kinship family face like intergenerational trauma and complex dynamics. I spent the past three and a half years examining this hypothesis to design psychological interventions to support all families in care. I first analysed the caregiver-child connection as children thrive in secure relationships. However, this was not enough. Psychologists trained like me can often prioritise caregiver-child relationships over other important connections. To promote child well-being holistically, I also analysed broader family, cultural and community roots. I sifted through over two and a half thousand studies to synthesise this literature and I identified 31 key studies. What's more, I met with 100 kinship, foster and biological families. Because these families are often time poor, we met in their homes and parks and slowly built a picture of their lives. Critically, I found connectedness does promote well-being for these children and ways we can support families to nourish these connections. My research provides evidence for policies to better support kinship and foster families to keep kids like Alex connected and thriving and not just surviving.