‘Family-Based Solutions’ was founded by Florence Koenderink, an independent consultant in child protection and alternative care reform. She has a background in Cultural Anthropology and 17 years of experience in family-based and institutional alternative care. She has worked mostly in low- and middle-income countries, such as China, Brazil, India, Kenya and Myanmar.
In the early years, she worked to improve conditions and understanding of children’s needs in institutions run by the state, by NGOs, by faith-based organisations and by private individuals. She worked with children of all ages with or without a wide variety of special needs, as well as with their caregivers and the managers of the institutions. She has been involved in various forms of family-based alternative care such as foster care and small group homes. As well as community-based support such as respite care, rehabilitation, therapy facilities, and special education. She was also confronted with the harsh realities of the effects of voluntourism and the orphanage industry.
Altogether, this experience has made her a knowledgeable, outspoken and fervent advocate for family strengthening, and inclusive family-based alternative care. As an independent consultant, Florence connects the grassroots-level experience to policy-level guidance, providing capacity building, awareness-raising, policy recommendations, and framework development. To date, she has brought out 12 publications on residential institutional childcare, the impact of institutionalisation, the need to move towards family-based care, and the dangers of supporting institutional care. Including ‘Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions. A training manual for caseworkers’, which can be ordered through the Publication and Web shop pages of this website.
Florence’s particular strength is her ability to observe and analyse situations, identify the issues that hamper the principles of child safeguarding, the best interests of the child and ‘do no harm’ principle, formulate how and why these issues are problematic in a way appropriate to the culture and understanding of the people listening and to sit together with the relevant people to come up with a practical, achievable alternative approach together. Ensuring the inclusion of children with disabilities and a trauma-informed approach are two areas of particular focus for Florence. Because the experience and the consequences of trauma are interwoven through all aspects of child protection and not always fully understood, trauma training is a core approach, which is further explained on the trauma training page.
Feel free to contact her at florence@familybasedsolutions.org if you are looking for technical advice, training, or guidance.