Jenny Almberg Ross is an experienced social work practitioner with twenty years’ post qualified experience with children, parents, and families using a solution-focused and trauma-informed approach, both in the UK and in her native Sweden.
Jenny’s extensive experience supporting families affected by substance misuse, mental health difficulties, domestic abuse, and trauma, means that in her work as a McKenzie Friend and a Family Mediator, she combines compassion with realism. She understands the pressures and challenges of being a parent, and how the trauma of divorce brings families into the spotlight of the court process, with all anxieties that entails.
Before joining Solutions for Families, Jenny worked for Cafcass as a Family Court Adviser in private law proceedings, in the ‘work to first hearing team’ (EIT). She understands Cafcass ‘from the inside’, and is well placed to help our clients work effectively with this influential child care agency to obtain the best results for their children, inclusion situations where children or adults may be at risk of harm .
Prior to this, Jenny worked for ten years within specialist children’s services, including the SWIFT service in East Sussex, where she specialized in assessing the needs and of people struggling with addiction, particularly alcohol and drugs, and helping them and their families to find solutions. In this role, the courts relied on her Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) assessments, interventions and reports, to guide their decisions.
Jenny recently trained as a Family Mediator, because she wants to help parents and families find ways to reduce conflict and negotiate child-focused family arrangements that last, because they work well everyone in the family.
Jenny has found great satisfaction and professional stimulation as a practice supervisor, passing on her knowledge and experience to trainee social workers, and as a mentor for higher education students in receipt of disability support allowance. She has specialized in work with people with a learning disability and neurodiversity.
Her expertise in all her practitioner roles is built on years of direct work with teens and young adults in residential care and then leaving care settings.
