Training for specialists on social networking with children and families

25-28 January EveryChild Ukraine in terms of the project “Preventing Separation of Children through Implementation of Gate-keeping mechanism” starts to teach Kiev Oblast specialists of social sphere and childcare services to use Swedish social networking method widely spread in Europe and Russia in their work with Ukrainian families in crisis.

Training will be facilitated by a qualified expert in social networking from Moscow Social Rehabilitation Center “Otradnoye” (Russian Federation). The training curricula is developed according to a book on Social Networking Method introduced in Russia available in English “Social Networking with Russian Families in Crisis”, Britta Holmberg, Sven Trygged (eds), is published in 2007 by Department of Social Work and INSWED at Stockholm University.

The method itself includes diagnostic components and therapeutic components. Social Networking can be used for the purpose of defining the type of social support a family needs, detecting the specific features of the family situation and the capacity of the family itself to cope with the crisis situation.

Social Networking is a tool of therapeutic intervention with the help of a net of social contacts of a child and/or his family, the method is mostly effective in working with multi-crisis families.

Net meeting that gather together the representatives from different social sections (family; relatives; friends; neighbors; club-mates; schoolmates/colleagues; officials; etc.), is a kind of crisis intervention. It is recommended especially when the despair is critical and the attempts to find the solution have been useless (cases like acute crisis or those at risk of crisis, such as suicide attempts, drug addiction, psychotic flash,violence towards children, divorce, etc.).

Through involvement of professionals and officials in an emotional meeting, a teem of net therapists create a context of system changes, a context of developing dialog among each member of the net. Such dialog leads to the transformation of a “disease” context into the “health” sphere.

Net Meeting is aimed at arranging possibilities of the net itself to find a solution to the problem, the decision which each member of the meeting will accept and support. One of the results of a Net Meeting is the raise of responsibility and motivation of the net itself to sustain the positive changes, initiated at the meeting. The surrounding people’s resources and support discovered at the meeting give the family hope and strength to overcome crisis. These, in their turn, serve to prevent negative consequences like family break-up, child separation from his/her family and institutionalization.

Trainings will develop skills on making personal maps of social contacts for children and families, on mobilization of the net, including preliminary work, arguments for the invitation of different participants for the network meeting, analysis of the meetings.

For a detailed information please contact Maria Rostalna – training manager at EveryChild Ukraine, mr@everychild.org.ua

EveryChild Ukraine - EveryChild started working in Ukraine in 1998 and is registered in Ukraine as a Representative Office of a foreign non-governmental organisation with its head office based in London.

EveryChild Ukraine is focused on blocking admission of children into institutions and contributes to their onward progression-back to their families, into a form of substitute family care, or moving to some form of independent living. EveryChild has been working in Ukraine for more than ten years. We work closely with the Government to reform policy to ensure long-term and sustainable change. We offer technical advice and training to service providers to build on existing services and pilot alternative forms of childcare and we work at community level to innovate new services. We develop interventions at local and national levels which will lead to the decrease of the number of children living in institutional care.

Contact information:
EveryChild Ukraine
Kyiv 02058, 49-a Polyova st.,
Phone: +38 044 457 29 10, Fax:+38 044 457 39 77
info@everychild.org.ua
Country Director: Kuzminskyy Volodymyr
Communications Manager: Shved Oksana

This release was published on openPR.