Developing a Model

Over the past 50 years, the awareness of the harm caused by institutionalising children has gradually sunken in and started spreading globally. Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand were the first to start moving away from institutional care and towards family-based alternative care. Since they were at the forefront of this movement, they had on the one hand the challenge of discovering alternatives and figuring out how to implement them properly with little precedence to go on, while on the other hand they had the advantage of being able to do so without outside pressure to get it done quickly. In the past decade or two that pressure has been rising on all countries.

Just over 30 years ago, the UN brought out the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and this included the stipulation that institutional care should only be used as a last resort. However, after a decade or so, the Committee on the Rights of the Child found that while this stipulation was present, individual states struggled to work towards this, without more concrete information on what they should do. Therefore, a new document was commissioned, which came out 10 years ago this month: the UN Guidelines on Alternative Care of Children. These guidelines provided more information about the requirements for alternative care. However, while this document gave very valuable information and a much clearer picture of what countries should be aiming for with regards to their alternative care system, it still did not give information about how to get there.

In 2007, Mulheir & Browne wrote ‘De-Institutionalisation and Transforming Children’s Services: A good guide to practice’ for the Daphne Programme of the European Commission. In this document, they laid out ‘ten steps’ that need to be taken in the deinstitutionalisation process. This overview brought forward a lot of issues that need attention in this transition process that are often overlooked or underestimated. Georgette Mulheir went on to become the CEO of Lumos foundation and that organisation further developed the ‘ten steps’ into ‘ten elements of transition of care’. Together the original document and the system developed by Lumos provided much more of a handle on what the process of deinstitutionalisation actually entails, and I have the impression that they have been instrumental in the progress made in the move towards family-based care globally, through the adoption and/or adaptation of the basic principles by many organisations and governments.

However, in the practice of daily life, it seems that more is needed. When I am providing guidance for a move from institutional to family-based alternative care, I provide training on the ten steps or elements, to help people understand what is involved. This knowledge is always welcomed and is felt to give a much greater understanding of the process. However, when it comes down to it, I find people looking around and scrambling to figure out what the next concrete step is that they have to take now. They understand that something needs to be done about awareness raising and situation analysis and redirecting resources, but right now, what is the next action to take?

This is what has made me decide to develop a kind of Theory of Change model where the process is broken down into actions rather than areas that need attention. Of course, being a model, it does not come close to breaking things down to individual actions. Instead it indicates what issue needs to be addressed next, but in a pretty concrete way. This will hopefully give people involved in the move from institutional to family-based alternative care enough of a guide for them to fill in the last details, relevant to their particular situation, themselves.

Work on this model is currently ongoing, when it is finished, you will of course hear more about it.

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