On the people who step in and change the course of a life — with Jo Efoti, who with her husband Bruno fostered 27 children while raising their own. And a story of my own I don’t often tell.

The kid in this story is me

Before I introduced Jo, I wanted to speak from the other side of the equation — as one of the kids someone showed up for.

Have you ever thought about the moments that shaped you? The people who stepped in — sometimes unexpectedly — and changed the course of your life? A coach, a teacher, a neighbour. Someone who really saw you, and made you feel like you mattered.

I left home when I was fourteen. Up to that point I lived in the worst house on one of the worst streets in an equally charming suburb of Logan, Brisbane. I have a younger brother, eight years my junior — I couldn’t take him with me. Our lives are vastly different today, and nothing has taught me more profoundly that to succeed in life — whatever success looks like — you need a sense of self-worth. Even a tiny amount.

We hopefully learn that self-love must come from within. But self-worth is first shaped by how others show up for us when we are at our most vulnerable.

Two people decided to step up for me at fourteen. They didn’t have to, but they did. It started with letting me rent their granny flat for next to nothing, then sending me back to school, teaching me to speak “propper” and use my manners — and a deal: they’d behave like parents if I behaved like their child. Officially they’re not my foster parents, but that’s the explanation we’ve stuck with. They are still family today. And the other kid they raised? He was in the room that night. Hi, Mick.

Twenty-seven children

Which is why I was so honoured to sit down with Jo Efoti — wife to Bruno for twenty-eight years, mum to their three, and mum again to twenty-five fostered children and eight young boarders along the way. Jo works across Tradies In Sight, the Department of Education, Orana Early Childhood Intervention and Efoti Counselling Services, comes from Grenfell — Henry Lawson country — and has called Dubbo home for twenty-three years.

We talked about what makes someone open their door: the moment she and Bruno decided to foster, the doubt and exhaustion and how they pushed through it, the heartbreak that comes packaged with that kind of love, and what fostering teaches you about the meaning of family in a world that defines it too narrowly. The evidence backs the instinct, by the way: mentored young people are 46% less likely to initiate drug use, and every dollar invested in mentoring returns an estimated $2.72. But nobody in that room needed a statistic to believe it — they just needed to look at Jo.

Normalising the village

The night ended where it had to: the village doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to foster twenty-seven children to show up. You can be the adult who says hello in the street (not creepy — villager). The one who asks a teenager how school’s going and waits for the real answer. The one who builds an intentional relationship with a kid who isn’t yours, because capacity is unevenly distributed and some families simply don’t have it — and as an adult I can see now what my own family’s capacity was, and why life looked the way it did.

Take a moment: who truly showed up for you? And what’s one small way you could start showing up for someone — today?

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Jo Efoti loves families and helping them grow — and Dubbo is lucky to have her. If tonight’s question lands with you, organisations like the Dubbo homelessness and youth housing services are already doing the work and need community behind them. About Let’s Taco’Bout It.