Time to take stock again, as Family-Based Solutions enters its fourth year, as a registered consultancy business this time. Some major changes have taken place in my personal life, which resonate through to Family-Based Solutions. Here I will give you an update on the changes and accomplishments.
So let’s start with the change of location and registration. In December, I moved out of Scotland (escaping Brexit) with the aim to settle in Belgium. There were some delays in this process, due to pandemic restrictions and closed borders finding opportunities to find a place to settle proved challenging. However, in the end, I did manage and since the start of summer, I have put moved to just outside Brussels. And in registering as an independent consultant, Family-Based Solutions became a business.
Though location and registration are different from a year ago, activities continue as before, although the schedule is getting more packed. Of course, Covid-19 has continued to rage and some semblance of normality is only just starting to tentatively emerge. However, in the past year, just like during the first six months of the pandemic, I have found that both networking and working from home can be very effective.
I continue to provide guidance on the transition of care for a large scale institution in India, and since December have been giving weekly training sessions on trauma-informed practice to the Family-Based Care team there. In September 2020, we all received a jolt, when the National Commission on the Protection of Child Rights in India gave the order that 184,000 children (in 8 states) had to be moved out of childcare institutions within 100 days. I was involved in fighting this order – which was eventually revoked. I also developed two strategies to help organisations cope in case they were forced to move children out of institutions rapidly, or if they wanted to provide support to children who had already been moved out with little or no preparation or support. These strategies are written to be applicable internationally and are adaptations of the Model for Alternative Care Reform, links to all three documents can be found HERE. These strategies were presented at a CAFO webinar in October and I presented them myself (online) at the International Conference on Children and Adolescents in Portugal in January.
A year ago, I had already become involved in Eurochild and UNICEF’s ambitious DataCare Project (more details HERE) in a supportive capacity. Over the course of the past year, I took on an increasingly active role in the research team and when the senior research coordinator moved on, I took on a lot of his role to fill the gap. We are currently in the final stages of completing the final report and policy brief for the research project mapping the alternative care data systems of 27 EU countries and the UK. And we are very excited to be able to share our findings soon. For this project, I also did several presentations to different audiences, to explain the research project and present initial findings.
Early this year, I was able to share the latest book: Best Intentions, Yet Still Causing Harm with the public. This can be ordered HERE. The book explains the effects of institutionalisation and of volunteers coming and going on children living in ‘orphanages’ and gives insights into making ethical choices when you want to volunteer.
Meanwhile, the work continues on the book explaining the effects of institutionalisation on children in more detail, to help prepare families taking in previously institutionalised children for what they can expect and to give them some guidance on how to handle the challenges they might face with the children. This I was already working on a year ago. But with the workload of other things increasing significantly – also the reason for reducing blogging further to once a month – most things that did not have hard deadlines tended to be moved forward and delayed. However, delayed does not mean forgotten, I am slowly finding time again to pick up this work.
Since the end of last year, I have also been involved in the Global Collaborative Platform on Transforming Children’s Care, which was brought together by the Better Care Network “to establish more strategic sector-wide collaboration spanning the global to the local level and inclusive of a wider range of stakeholders. It aims to enable organisations engaged in child protection and care reform to agree on common principles and approaches, leverage and build on one another’s work, secure greater and more sustainable impact, contribute to a shared learning agenda and undertake joint advocacy.” I’m part of five working groups and task forces within this platform. It is very interesting to have discussions with other experts on how to develop common standards and avoid parallel work being done in various countries.
So, I am not remotely bored just yet. And it does not look like I will be any time soon. At the moment there are a number of different projects in the pipeline for the coming months, and it looks like I may end up having to choose which ones to take on and which ones to leave, because there are only so many hours in a day. I continue to be delighted to be able to make a small difference in a lot of different ways.
Please share this blog to help spread awareness.
Thanks so much