Secure Start®

Committed to strong families, resilient children, and trauma-informed organisations

Hi! My name is Colby Pearce and I am the owner/operator of Secure Start®.  Through Secure Start I offer a range of services, including:

  • Psychological intervention for children, teens and families;
  • Consultancy services in child protection, out-of-home care, and mental health service provision;
  • Teaching, training, and supervision; and
  • Program development, implementation and evaluation.

Across more than twenty-five years I have contributed to professional and community knowledge and practice in the areas of:

  • Teen mental health and suicide prevention;
  • Childhood attachment and resilience;
  • Psychological intervention with children who have experienced abuse, neglect and family/relationship trauma;
  • Therapeutic care and management of children and teens who are recovering from early adversity;
  • Trauma-informed practice in schools and other child-related organisations.

In addition to my psychotherapy work with children, teens and families, I am currently working on two major projects:

  1. The implementation of the CARE* Curriculum in Relative/Kinship Care (The Kinship CARE Project); and
  2. The implementation of the Triple-A Model of Care among TUSLA foster carers in Donegal, Ireland.

I have been delivering training to parents, caregivers and other professionals for more than twenty-five years and was recently successful in having training for Kinship Carers approved for delivery in Victoria in 2020 via the Carer Kafe.

In keeping with my longstanding interest in supporting consistency of care and management between home and school for children who are recovering from trauma at home, I developed two new complementary resources for trauma-informed, therapeutic care in the home and school settings. Click on each image to learn more and/or to access the resource.

*Pearce, C (2016), A Short Introduction to Attachment and Attachment Disorder (Second Edition), London: Jessica Kingsley