Family relief project
Family support system, long since practiced in Europe, is now active in Kyiv. Unlike foster families and children’s homes, this program envisages a brief period of family care – up to six months to avoid adaptation. Under this program children are accepted regardless of their background: abandoned by mothers at maternity hospitals, foundlings, homeless children, ones from problem families, those left after the death of their parents, and so on. This project boils down to ridding the child of the homeless status and legal proceedings that can last for months (in the case of orphanage), when this child can be accommodated by a family within 24 hours, on a temporary basis. Then psychologists and social workers step in, dealing with that child’s biological parents, if any, talking them into rebuilding the family. If no parents are found, they start searching for a foster family.
In Kyiv, the number of homeless/abandoned children is on a steady downward curve, registering 2,500 today. Experts say that in two-thirds of such cases the reason is that the child is the victim of a problem family, a problem that remains unsolved because the state and/or public does not give a hoot. Compared to Europe and North America, Ukraine’s parentless/homeless children ratio is very high: 1.2 percent in the last decade (over 100,000 children), reaching 1.9 percent in the past couple of years. European and Ukrainian experts agree that parents who can’t cope with such problems need psychological, moral, and legal aid; that only after this aid is provided such parents can be allowed to take care of their children.
Vasylyna DYBAILO, CEO, Kozhnii Dytyni [Every Child Matters] Partnership:
“Family support system is well developed abroad, with each community providing support as soon as they learn about a problem family; they quickly solve it by choosing foster families, more often than not from among the relatives. Here in Ukraine, unfortunately, orphanage and/or boarding school accommodations are the only option, when worse comes to worst, considering that such accommodations should be reduced to a minimum.”
This project was made possible in association with the Kozhnii Dytyni International Partnership (with the latter allocating 1,000 dollars a year) and Kyiv State City Administration (it has promised to keep financing the project in the second half of next year). Under this project, each such family will be paid 4,000 hryvnias plus “two living wages for a child from the state.” Dybailo says her colleagues first wanted to reduce the child’s stay with the foster family to three months, considering that the project is aimed at returning children to their biological parents, but then adopted six months, in view to current realities.
“We come to their aid like an ambulance team,” says Natalia Dudko, family support activist in Brovary, mother of three children who took care of 11 children in 2009, eventually returning seven to their biological parents and arranging for foster families for the rest. “In each such case you have to accept the pain of others as your own, and look for another way out of the situation. It is very important to have like-minded people as members of your team – people for whom securing the child’s well-being is number-one task. This makes up a long list of daycare center and grade school personnel, including psychologists and speech therapists. Our children are provided diversified professional treatment. My husband and I do not position ourselves as daddy and mom. We try to unburden the child of his/her problems. We make this child feel at home and then try to figure out the problem. This takes professionalism. We also act as go-betweens with the biological parents.”
Actually, this requires professionalism, and there is the emotional aspect. A family taking care of an abandoned/parentless child gets emotionally involved. They are human and they can’t but fall in love with this child, facing the inevitable parting, being aware of it yet unprepared to cope with it. Something easier said than done.
Hopefully, such family support experience, accumulated in Brovary and Bila Tserkva (starting in 2009), will help solve this problem in Kyiv, aided by the Kozhnii Dytyni organizations, and the rest of Ukraine in the long run.
According to Valentyna Berezina, City Council’s deputy head of the Children’s Relief Department, “We’re planning several such temporary foster families in the Obolon and Solomianka city districts. These families must be aged between 35 and 60 years (65 years is the limit for men). They must have marriage certificates, live on the same premises, with a child-raising experience. Also, one of the parents must combine patronage with another kind of occupation. Other city districts can join this project.”
Such “patronage families” must undergo a special course of training, arranged for by organizations that are part of this project, Kozhnii Dytyni topping the list, also by the Kyiv City Council’s Children’s Service Department. The Patronage Family Service Department will function under the auspices of Child’s Shelter No. 1 in Kyiv (officially known as the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation Section of the Child-Care Center). Children in need of such help will live with patronage families.
