Conscious Parent Academy - Replacement parent urgently needed!

Conscious Parent Academy - Replacement parent urgently needed!

For various reasons, it happens that children cannot live together with their parents and they are looked after by other adults than their biological parents - grandparents, relatives or even adult siblings. Often, however, the caregivers must be outside the child's family or, in the worst case, institutions. Providing foster care, building emotional relationships, and the degree of responsibility that caregivers have is a broad and complicated issue. The foster parents require legal, social, emotional and educational support.

The main goal of the project is to raise the educational competences of foster families and to expand and develop the competences of educators and other employees supporting adult learners by:

  • implementation of various forms of support: stationary training, online training, blended mobility;
  • creation of tools supporting the implementation of tasks resulting from foster care (or its alternative counterparts in partner countries);
  • improving the image of foster families .

The target groups in the project are:

  • Educators - people who professionally support foster families: foster care coordinators, psychologists, therapists, family assistants
  • Caregivers - people actually providing foster care; related, unrelated, professional and reliable foster families and family orphanages

Under the 3-year project, the partner group plans the following forms of support:

  • training for staff coordinating foster care;
  • training for persons providing foster care;
  • developing a Guide - help-desk for persons in charge of foster care;
  • developing materials promoting foster care;
  • creating support groups and equipping them with an online training package and webinars devoted to broadly understood foster care.

Project period: 2020 09 01 - 2023 08 31

The proposed forms of support are a response to the diagnosed problems of both the staff of care institutions and foster families:

  • insufficient ability to communicate properly;
  • feeling burned out;
  • insufficient knowledge about the forms and methods of foster care in partner countries;
  • low level of knowledge about the forms and methods of working with a child with special needs;
  • problems with building good relationship and trust in a foster family;
  • lack of awareness (or low awareness) of how important foster parenting is and how difficult it is to teach a newly adopted child the norms and rules of home.

Planned results including intellectual outputs (IO) :

  • Online training for caregivers (IO1)
  • Webinars for Caregivers (IO2)
  • Guide - help-desk containing guidelines, recommendations, methods of crisis management (IO3)
  • 27 trained participants of the project - staff involved in adult education
  • 27 trained foster parents
  • 1 website with forum
  • 2 films promoting foster care (creating a positive image of custody)
  • Leaflets and posters promoting foster care
  • 3 support groups, 1 in each partner country

27 educators and 27 foster parents and caregivers will participate directly in the project. However, in the context of long-term project results, the final audience will be much larger. It is planned to reach the results achieved under the project to a group of min. 300 foster families.

Partners:

  • Foundation for education SMART from Opole, Municipal Social Welfare Center in Żory (Poland) - coordinating institution, fundacjasmart.pl
  • IAC - Instituto de Apoio à Criança z Lisbon, (Portugal), iacrianca.pt
  • Public insitution “Mano šeimos akademija” (Lithuania), msakademija.lt
  •  Associated partner - public institution "eMundus" (Lithuania)

Website: consciousparentacademy.com