Skip to Main Content
You are now in the main content area
Laura Petrenko

Petrenko, Laura

Foster Support Worker, Key Assets
EducationBA, MSW

After completing the Bachelor of Arts in ECE program at Toronto Metropolitan University, Laura was accepted into the University of Toronto’s Master of Social Work program where she specialized in working with children with special needs and their families. After graduating, Laura began teaching in Seneca College's Early Childhood Education diploma and Bachelor of Child Development degree programs, working with students as they are just starting their journeys that will lead them to become educators, teachers, researchers, and practitioners.

She currently works with Key Assets, an independent foster care organization, as a foster support worker. Her role as part of a multidisciplinary team is to supervise, train, and support carers of children with emotional, developmental, and behavioural challenges. Many of the children she works with have experienced trauma and abuse; Laura helps to guide foster carers in providing responsive, therapeutic care to their foster children, giving them the happy and safe childhood they deserve.

According to Laura, the experience gained from the BA in ECE program at Toronto Metropolitan University has been invaluable in pursuing her passions and furthering her education.   She was inspired by courses, professors, and placements (she has even completed an international field placement experience in the Philippines) that encouraged her to examine the "bigger picture", the systemic issues facing marginalized children and their families in Canada and abroad. Laura knew she wanted to get involved, go further, and to be the voice for the voiceless, and believes that Toronto Metropolitan University helped her develop the tools and connections to do that. She further maintains that the program definitely laid the groundwork for her MSW. She felt well prepared having covered such a broad range and depth of theories, areas of practice, and issues during the BA, that going to Graduate school felt less like an insurmountable challenge and more like a natural progression of her education.