Family-based alternative care services – a chance for children deprived of parental love

Twenty-five years ago, on 20 November 1985, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This unique document explicitly states that the best environment for a child’s harmonious development is the family, where the child has the opportunity to develop his or her personality in an atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding.

Guided by the provisions of the Convention, the organization Partnerships for Every Child (P4EC) has been implementing, over its 19 years of activity in the Republic of Moldova, a number of projects aimed at supporting and protecting children separated from their families. This includes providing support to central and local public authorities in their efforts to keep families united and strong, so as to offer children the opportunity to grow up in safe and protective environments. P4EC provides support and technical assistance to authorities in their efforts to develop and make available to children and families a coherent and integrated system of social services.

“The most important thing is what we offer to people and, especially, to the children around us. This refers to new approaches and attitudes that lead to ensuring a happier childhood for the children of our country, alongside their parents and families. A new order, if you will, which places at its core the recognition of human dignity and the assumption of responsibility by individuals toward themselves, toward the child they bring into the world, and toward their fellow human beings,” believes Stela Grigoraș, Director of the Partnerships for Every Child Association.

Thus, P4EC supports vulnerable families in order to prevent separation, reintegrates children back into their families, and develops family-based alternative care services such as Professional Foster Care for those families that are no longer able to care for their own children. Above all, P4EC protects children from abuse, exploitation, neglect, and violence. To this end, P4EC is implementing a new project focused on improving the safety, well-being, and development of highly vulnerable children, especially those deprived of adequate family care. By 2017, at the national level, the organization aims to offer opportunities to 100,000 children at risk of being deprived of family care, living in inadequate family conditions, or already lacking family care—either to remain within a strengthened family or to be placed in an appropriate, protective, and permanent family-based alternative care environment.

P4EC also supports its partners within local public administrations in strengthening their capacities and developing their own policies for the protection of children at risk, as well as for the protection of their families.

The Public Association “Partnerships for Every Child” was founded in March 2010, as the legal successor of the EveryChild UK in the Republic of Moldova.

Source: Timpul.md