It is possible for individual institutions to decide to start deinstitutionalisation by themselves, at the grassroots level. They can look for ways to support the families of the children in their care, so that the children can go home. They can provide training to the staff working at the institution to give them the skills to become foster parents or small group home caregivers instead, for the children who do not have a home they can go back to.
I am currently involved with an organisation in India that is working not just towards making sure all the children in their care can be moved to family situations, but to create a replicable model that can be followed by others in the country. However, to be able to put together a sustainable system of family-based alternative care, some government involvement is always necessary.
In this blog I want to highlight two essential points of government involvement, as a starting point. Namely: 1) putting the legislation in place that makes family-based alternative care possible and 2) providing funding for family strengthening in a variety of ways.
When, as an individual or a small organisation, you decide to get involved in a move towards family-based care, you may find that the laws in the country do not have the provisions that would help back you up, or you may even find that there are laws expressly forbidding what needs to be done. For example, in many countries a child with a court order for placement in an institution, is not allowed to be moved out of that institution again without another court order. And if, for example, foster care is not something that is known or developed in this country, the courts are unlikely to grant you an order to place the child in a foster family. To make this possible, the laws need to be changed.
Getting laws changed is never a simple thing to do. However, when it comes to institutionalised children, in many countries, it is even more complicated than you would think. This is because it is not always very clear what government department is responsible for a particular child. It is not at all uncommon for boarding schools and institutions with educational purposes to fall under the Ministry of Education, while institutions for orphans and abandoned children fall under the Ministry of Social Affair, or of Internal Affairs, or of Women and Children (or a combination of some or all), and institutions for children with disabilities regularly fall under the Ministry of Health. This is bad enough, but in fact this still sounds relatively clear cut. Further complications enter into the picture when abandoned children or children with disabilities also require education, and… well, I think you get the picture.
Many different government departments are involved and most of them prefer to keep their responsibilities limited, so when they see any opportunity, they pass responsibilities on to another department. And to say that communication between different government departments is usually not very smooth, is something of an understatement.
So to get anything done at all, the first step is to make sure you build the relationships and connections that give you a shot at getting all the involved parties sitting around a single table, to work out what needs to be changed and who will take what part in this. This is the only way to avoid months or even years of running from one department to the next, always being told that for this particular issue, you need to be somewhere else.
Once you have everyone in the same room, you can start to discuss together the kind of family-based alternative care that would be beneficial for the country, looking at examples from neighbouring or other countries in a similar situation to find out what does and does not work. Once this has been decided, you can all look together at the legislation in place and how it would need to be changed to make what you have decided on possible.
The other issue mentioned is funding for family strengthening. More and more governments are already providing – in real life, or sometimes on paper in the legislation – various forms of family-strengthening funds. For example, child benefits, cash transfers to people below a certain poverty line, free or subsidised education and health care, and assistance with housing.
If these things are already present in legislation, but not in daily life, your job will be to put pressure on various state bodies to provide what they are legally required to provide. If these provisions are not present in legislation, then you will have to go back to the first part of this blog and get the relevant parties in a room to work on that.
Something else to work on here, in some cases, is that sometimes things like child benefits are paid to the child’s parents, but if the parents are not able to care for the child, they are not paid to anyone. Pushing for a system where benefits for children ‘follow the child’, so that the person caring for the child, whether this is the child’s parents, other relatives or foster parents, receives the benefits and can use them to care for the child, is very effective in opening up new family-based care solutions.
And of course, if you have the right government connections and are able to persuade them to set up, monitor and/or finance a foster care system and community-based support services, well, that would not be a bad thing.
To write this down is easy enough, to get things moving, is a lot harder. It is important to get people involved with contacts in the right places and people who understand the workings of the government, to think out and execute a strategy that will help you achieve what has been described, and hopefully more.
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