Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Recruit Foster Carers

Part 12 of the explanation with the ToC: Like the individual assessments, the recruitment and selection of foster families, caregivers for small group homes, mentors for supported living and other people who will be taking care of children in the community in the alternative care options that will be established, needs to be done at the local level. Ideally, children should be placed within the community that they came from or if that is not possible, the community near the school they have attended while in the institution. This provides the child with some established connections to the people living nearby.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Individual Assessment

Part 11 of the explanation with the ToC: No matter whether you are working on the national, district or grassroots level, individual assessments need to be done for every single child, to be able to determine what his or her situation is and what kind of placement is in his or her best interest.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Capacity Building

Part 10 of the explanation with the ToC: Capacity building is a very general term to indicate things that are needed to make sure that people involved in the project are able to do their jobs or to help where help is needed. It involves:

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Recruitment

Part 9 of the explanation with the ToC: Once you have the data collected and analysed, have come up with a strategy and made a plan and a timeline out of that, have designed awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns and a monitoring and evaluation system to keep an eye on whether it works, you will start to find that the initial transition team is no longer able to handle all the work that needs to be done. As people are needed to run the advocacy campaign, people to run the awareness campaign, people to take care of the monitoring and evaluation, plus you have a mountain of work ahead of you with individual assessments, recruiting and training carers and so on.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: M&E

Part 6 of the explanation with the ToC: Setting up Monitoring and Evaluation Systems for various parts of the project.

There is not an exact moment when you need to start to develop monitoring and evaluation systems, essentially it is something that needs to be put in place for all parts of the transition process where it is possible to check whether the outcomes of what is being done are what they were supposed to be. Monitoring this allows for a course adjustment in a case where the outcomes turn out not to be as hoped.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Data Gathering & Analysis 2

Part 5 of the explanation of the ToC: In the previous blog we saw why it is so important to gather data and what kind of data needs to be gathered at the national and community level. This week, we see what else is involved in data gathering and Analysis, starting with the data that needs to be gathered at the level of individual institutions.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Data Gathering & Analysis 1

Part 4 of the explanation with the ToC: Gathering data, in a variety of ways and on a variety of topics, is an essential part of the process. Information on the current situation is the foundation of all decisions, strategies and actions that will be made. Without knowing what is and is not currently present, and the background of why that is so, there is no way of determining what needs to happen and what needs to be put in place.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Planning

Part 3 of the explanation of the ToC: The first job of the transition manager or the transition team will be to create an overview of what the transition process will entail – something like this model, but with more details relevant to the local situation -, what resources will be needed to take care of at different stages, who will be responsible for taking care of various tasks and a rough timeline on how all of this will fit together. From that overview, a strategy and a plan can be devised.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Goal and Start

Part 2 of the explanation of the ToC model: The overall goal of this model is the full implementation of the UN Guidelines on Alternative Care for Children. Reaching this goal means that the two underlying principles of these Guidelines are adhered to throughout all systems of child protection and alternative care. These two principles are the Necessity Principle and the Suitability Principle. The Necessity Principle refers to making sure that children grow up in their own family unless it is impossible or not in their best interest for that to happen. In effect, this covers the prevention of family-separation and motivation for making every attempt towards family reintegration, in cases where separation has already taken place.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Introduction

On 30 March, I shared the Theory of Change model to achieve full implementation of the UN Guidelines on Alternative Care for Children with you (HERE). As I mentioned then, I currently do not have the funds to publish this model with its explanation. The fundraiser on GoFundMe to bring together these funds needed has not been terribly successful to date. And yet I do want to make the explanation that goes with the model available to people. So, I have decided to cut the explanation up into pieces and to share it (in a slightly abbreviated version) with you in blogs over the coming weeks. It will cover many topics that have come past in the blogs so far but in a more structured way. Today, the introduction to the explanation of the model:

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