Six years have passed since the start of Family-Based Solutions. The past year has brought an interesting combination of continuing involvement in projects and exciting new things.
The biggest development has been the start of the Compendium Project, which has been going on for a year now. It is an ambitious, independent project that aims to gather the practical tools, guidance and resources that already exist to support the implementation of alternative care reform. These resources will all be analysed for quality and gaps and in a later stage new resources will be created, in collaboration with other experts, to fill those gaps. Then all the resources, with the analysis, will be used as the database for an AI app that acts as a librarian and provides answers, references and context when questions about care reform are typed into it. The aim is to make this available – free of charge – in all languages, to support people involved in care reform on the ground. More than 2000 tools and resources have been gathered, so far, and around 55 of them have been fully analysed.
Over the past year, I have approached many organisations and practitioners involved in care reform to invite them to become part of the project’s oversight committee, to share unpublished tools and resources, and to contribute financially to enable the project to be completed in about 2.5 years. To date, the project is still self-funded and therefore not on a timeline that is likely to see its completion in 2.5 years. I have set up a crowdfunding page, to support the project, which you can find HERE. The oversight committee has been set up, with members from different countries, both from organisations and independent practitioners. The third oversight committee meeting will take place this week. In addition, a partnership has been developed with someone to build the AI app that will eventually make the outcomes of the project easily accessible to all.
The training programme based on ‘Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions. A training manual for case workers’ has been fully developed. In an overhaul of this website, a dedicated ‘trauma training’ page was set up to provide people with information on it. The full 12-day in-person training course has not taken place, yet. However, interest in it has been expressed by organisations in Nigeria and India. Part-training was given for different settings. I have provided two online sessions in a series of four for Sceptre & Prima to provide adoptive parents in Nigeria with information. There have been various online sessions with social workers and counsellors involved in deinstitutionalization in India. As a trustee of Tushinde Foundation, I have provided one online session on attachment and one full day of in-person training for the Tushinde staff in Kenya, adapted to their work to prevent unnecessary separation of children from their families, rather than moving children from institutions into families. The latter when I travelled to Nairobi in March to visit the project and attend the Kenyan board meeting.
Currently, I am involved in three consultancies. One for the UNICEF response office in the Czech Republic to provide recommendations to strengthen the child protection system and the response to Ukrainian refugee children in the country. One for the UNICEF country office in Tajikistan, which in a way is an extension of the work I have done to develop a toolkit for assessing administrative data systems on children in alternative care and adoption/kafalah for UNICEF HQ. This is to provide support on the next steps after they piloted the toolkit in Tajikistan. Finally, a consultancy for UBS Optimus together with two other consultants to gather information on support available for deaf children in four European countries and at EU level.
All this happens alongside ongoing support to the FBC (family-based care) team of Snehalaya in India. I have also developed a trauma model (which you can find HERE), which I presented with a poster at the UNESCO conference on family-strengthening in Galway in June. Something that is also very exciting, although I did not actively work on it this year, is seeing how ‘Understanding the Trauma of Children in Institutions’ is being implemented in all aspects of the care provided by an organisation in China that I was involved with until 2016. They have described their approach in several blogs, one of which you can find HERE.
I look forward to what the coming year will bring and in what new ways I will be able to support children in vulnerable situations.
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