Making It Real! (Blog post)
A few weeks ago We ran our ‘Making It Real’ workshop, which was a huge success. After hosting it in-person for a couple of years, we put it online in March to see if it would work via Zoom. We made sure the day was interactive and engaging, with plenty of opportunities for networking. Despite it not being in-person it still felt personal. That workshop sold out so we ran it again this September and were delighted that it was full.
Most of our events are aimed at parents or prospective parents, but this one is aimed at counsellors working with donor conception families, staff in fertility clinics and family lawyers. At DC Network we are in touch with people at all stages of family life and often over decades; watching the children grow and seeing the questions and family circumstances change and evolve. We also have a large group of DC people in our membership. This gives us a very good understanding of that long view and can, to some degree, reflect on what is helpful and truthful in terms of supporting parents and prospective parents at the various stages. We wanted to share that experience to give some insight to other professionals.
Many are working with people at a particular point in the lifetime of the family, often addressing a particular issue. Counsellors may be doing implications counselling pre-treatment, lawyers may be resolving surrogacy issues once a baby is born, embryologists may be working hard to achieve a much-wanted pregnancy. Many of them never know ‘what happens next’ for these families. What are the outcomes and what messages and support will help them and their children the most in the long term?
So, out of our conversations on these topics, the workshop was developed. We called it ‘Making It Real’ as we felt this encapsulated what we were trying to achieve – bringing the experiences of real families to life.
Feedback was fantastic! We loved connecting with all the wonderful people who attended and who are offering their expertise and wisdom to DC families.
We were enormously grateful to our speakers for sharing their thoughtful and occasionally challenging stories and research.
We are looking forward to the next one in 2022! ❤️