In the previous blog, I described how, coming up to the 1-year-aniversary of the start of Why Family-Based Solutions, I have been putting a lot of thought into what I would like the organisation to be about and what I can and want to aim to achieve. In today’s blog, I would like to share some of the conclusions that I have drawn.
Continue reading “Plans for Why Family-Based Solutions”Category: Work Progress
One Year On
About a year ago, the plan to start Why Family-Based Solutions was starting to unfold in my head. Though the website and the first blogs did not appear until later on in September, several weeks of thinking, planning and organising had already taken place by then.
As I was coming up to the point of living with Why Family-Based Solutions for a year, I have spent some time thinking again, this time about just what I want to accomplish with the organisation, what direction I want to take with it.
Continue reading “One Year On”What’s Ahead
A look at what you can expect over the next few months and how you can get involved in deciding what the blogs coming up should be about.
Continue reading “What’s Ahead”How the Report Changed My Life
In the past two blogs I have written about what I did for the report ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe’ (which you can download HERE), in this blog I want to tell you something about what the report – or rather the working on the research project that led to the report – has done for me. It is not that often that working on a project makes you change the direction of your life and work, but in this case, it really did.
Continue reading “How the Report Changed My Life”Developing the Report
A week ago the report ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe’ was made available to the public (it can be downloaded HERE). In the previous blog, I wrote about how I ended up starting this enormous project in the summer of 2015. This week I would like to dive into another question that I get asked quite a lot with regards to the report: How did you find all of that information?
Continue reading “Developing the Report”The Report Is Out
This week a major milestone was reached: ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe’, the report giving an overview of the child protection and alternative care situation – and circumstances that impact it – for all autonomous countries in the world, was finally finished. It is now available to the public as a free download, which you can find HERE.
Continue reading “The Report Is Out”India Trip
As I am about to get on an airplane again, to go home tomorrow, it seems like a good moment to look back on the weeks I have spent in India and the work I have done here.
As many of you know, before I founded Why Family-Based Solutions, I ran Orphanage Projects. This trip has been an interesting juxtaposition of the work of those two. Having spent half of it on strategising for deinstitutionalisation and the other half on still improving conditions in several institutions.
Continue reading “India Trip”“Intellectual Disability Among Children Everywhere”
This week the latest manual, the fourth in the series ‘Children Everywhere’, has come out. Originally, it was written for the NGO Orphanage Projects, giving advice to people running institutions on how to provide better care to children with intellectual disabilities. The writing and publishing of a manual do not happen in the space of a day or a week, so it was written well before any plans of folding Orphanage Projects and starting Why Family-Based Solutions occurred to me.
This does not mean that the book is no longer relevant, however. First of all, there are still many, many institutions caring for children with intellectual disabilities, without necessarily being quite aware of the needs of these children. But secondly, although written for institutional situations, the manual can play an important role in family-based care too.
Continue reading ““Intellectual Disability Among Children Everywhere””Working on ‘The World List’
In the summer of 2015, I was starting to get a clearer insight into the diverse backgrounds and problems that were the main cause of the institutionalisation of children in a few specific countries. This insight led me to speculate that actually to be able to really tackle the issue of children institutions – and to get an idea of what is needed to keep them out of them – it would be useful to have information about a few specific subjects for each country, to gain an understanding of what is already in place, what are major obstacles and how alternative care and institutional care are handled.
Continue reading “Working on ‘The World List’”