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: Awareness-Raising & Advocacy 2

Part 8 of the explanation with the ToC: Last Thursday, an overview was given about the kind of issues that require awareness-raising and advocacy and why this is important to take seriously. In this blog, more information will be given on this, and on breaking the news that you are planning to move from institutional to family-based care.

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Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Awareness-Raising & Advocacy 1

Part 7 of the explanation with the ToC: It could be said that awareness-raising and advocacy are two sides of the same coin. Advocacy is raising awareness in the government and its representatives and through doing so lobbying for necessary changes. Awareness-raising is providing communities, families, and the general public – either individually, in small groups or en masse – with information about issues that they might not have had knowledge or proper insight about previously, to change their mindset and opinion.

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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: 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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Developing a Model

Over the past 50 years, the awareness of the harm caused by institutionalising children has gradually sunken in and started spreading globally. Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand were the first to start moving away from institutional care and towards family-based alternative care. Since they were at the forefront of this movement, they had on the one hand the challenge of discovering alternatives and figuring out how to implement them properly with little precedence to go on, while on the other hand they had the advantage of being able to do so without outside pressure to get it done quickly. In the past decade or two that pressure has been rising on all countries.

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