Community Services to Vulnerable Groups: OVC Quarterly Report January - March 2015

The project targets "social orphans," children whose parents are living but unable to provide proper care, or children of parents who have been denied parental rights. The project's activities focus on working with families and social service professionals to maintain and reintegrate children within their original family units. The project has three main objectives: improve access to and further develop an integrated system of community-based prevention and services for families with institutionalized and at-risk children; improve the quality of training and education available to social service providers; and provide technical assistance to social service providers through policy development, methodology consultations, and advocacy efforts. This quarter, the project's activities focused on ensuring the sustainability of changes introduced within the previous project years. Significant achievements were made in further dissemination of the experiences of youth afterschool clubs in the Vitebsk region. The Polotsk Socio-pedagogical Center hosted the Vitebsk Regional Conference to disseminate their experience on youth afterschool clubs as a means to ensure children's right to live in a family. Representatives of 100% of child protection services from all over the Vitebsk region, as well as the regional oblast-level authorities, took part in the Conference. As a result of the conference, the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee issued a special order that by the end of 2015 each community in the Vitebsk region will open a youth afterschool club for children from at-risk families. Two sub-grant projects to pilot two implementation models of SafeCare in Belarus were successfully completed. Both models were presented and received recognition at the final roundtables of educational authorities and specialists from Grodno and Mogilev regions. Local authorities elaborated plans for its further development and geographic expansion using existing community budgets. The implementation of child protection system reforms through the Family-centered Approach and PRIDE was supported by step-down trainings conducted by a cadre of local child protection specialists trained as trainers by ChildFund and partner re-training institutes. The role of universities and re-training institutes in preparing new cohorts of well-trained specialists is essential in the context of a high level of staff turnover in the child protection system. ChildFund's project sustainability plan ensures universities and re-training institutes' capacity and motivation to independently deliver innovative training programs. This quarter, during the networking meeting, faculty members of six universities and re-training institutes, who were previously trained on the Family-centered Approach and PRIDE methodology, had the unique opportunity to share their experiences, challenges, and successes that they faced implementing innovative ChildFund programs. The publication "Methodological Recommendations on Rehabilitation of OVC Families" was disseminated among all child protection services in the country. This publication completed the series of methodological recommendations and quality standards that have been prepared by the Task Group since 2007. The feedback community child protection specialists emphasized the exceptional relevance of the Methodological Recommendations for specialists' professional needs and highlighted their straightforward, practical application even by those specialists who have not received specialized training. The main outputs of project implementation during the period between January 1 and March 31, 2015, include 1,802 parents and 224 children utilizing community-based prevention and rehabilitation services, 519 child protection specialists representing 221 organizations participating in capacity-building events, and 283 specialists supported with targeted consultations and methodological and informational materials provided by ChildFund.