getting rid of institutionalised childcare

[slkk]

I was listening to the radio today and a man was there talking about his charity. He began many years ago trying to improve orphanages but more recently has changed the focus of their work to get rid of orphanages and find homes and families for children. Their work has dramatically reduced the number of children in orphanages in Bosnia and they are now working in many countries. All donations before 22 December will be matched by the UK government. I thought this may interest you and you may have opinions on this aim as some of you have seen these orphanages first hand. The charity is hope and homes for children.

notanumb3r.org/#home

INterestingly there was a lot of work done in China after the Dying Rooms documentary was aired, a lot of donations and making the government face up to the truly dreadful conditions in some places. As a result a high proportion of "abandoned" children in China now live in foster care with families.

I should add in the interests of fairness that DS's institution was not dreadful and even was rather good. Spotlessly clean, cheerful with some amazing women caring for him. There are issues with institutional care but in my experience good quality institutional care offers a better option than poor quality foster care.

In order to move to a foster care type system countries need much better developed social services and financial support structures otherwise you're just swapping one kind of inadequate care for another.

If you're interested here are some photos of DS's Childrens Home

Yes there was some discussion about this on the radio. It did cross my mind that without a developed and structured system of monitoring foster care there is a risk that children could be taken in as home helpers or worse. However if the government works with the charities to put these systems into place hopefully it will help a lot of children who are in less stimulating and terribly overcrowded orphanages. Thank you for the pictures, Kew. It is interesting to see these places.

I'm trying for one minute to put people off donating - good foster or kinship care is generally better than institutional care.

Ha ha ha - I'm NOT trying to put people off!!!

And also to be fair the country dS is from doesn't have a reputation for terrible or over crowded orphanages so I'm not necessarily saying that it isn't significantly worse in other places.

Some of the funding goes to supporting birth families as they say many children in these orphanages have birth families in poverty. Where is ds from?

Kazakhstan

I'm glad he was in a decent place Kew those amazing women will have helped him enormously.