AVSI Beauty of The Family

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The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The experience of AVSI projects in Burundi, Ecuador, Romania
To recognize and assist the family is one of the greatest services which can be rendered nowadays to the common good and to the authentic development of individuals and societies, as well as the best means of ensuring the dignity, equality and true freedom of the human person.
Pope Benedict XVI, Valencia (9 July 2006)
This document is a collection of Best Practices of programs with families, and has been made possible thanks to the project co-financed by the European Union titled Companionship for Development: Alianzas trans-nacionales entre Actores No Estatales, Autoridades Locales y la comunidad institucional para una cooperacin al desarrollo ms eficiente. cod. DCI-NSA / 2009 / 205 - 463. The primary objective of this project, started in November 2009, is to improve networking and exchange of information and good practices among the Non-state Actors and Local Authorities connected with the AVSI Network and in particular the following European NGOs: AVSI (Italy), CESAL (Spain), VIDA (Portugal), AVSI POLSKA (Poland), FUNDATIA (Romania) and SOTAS (Lithuania).
Index
Introduction 1.
1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4.
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The experience in Burundi

Introduction Background The Centre Ongoing case histories
The family, a beauty to be conquered once again Pocket-edition n.11

Produced by Benedetta Fontana, AVSI Authors: Benedetta Fontana, Raffaella Boschetti, Stefania Famlonga, Simona Carobene, Eugenia Scabini, Giovanna Rossi, Stefania Meda, Elisabetta Carr Copyright AVSI www.avsi.org anno 2011 Photo courtesy Luca Rossetti, Fabrizio Lava, Brett Morton, AVSI staff Cover image AVSI: Romania Graphic Design Accent on Design, Milan Codice ISBN 978-88-97485-06-3
2.
2.1. 2.2. 2.3.
The experience in Ecuador

Introduction The context and AVSIs intervention Innovative and methodological aspects of work done
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3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6.
The experience in Romania

Introduction Background Projects and numbers of families supported First exploration: hiv-positive minors Second exploration: preventing school drop out Common work method
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40 42 44 44 48 51
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4.1. 4.2.
Family: reections upon the experience

The reliability of the family ties di Eugenia Scabini AVSI interventions with families within the framework of good practices di Giovanna Rossi
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5.
5.1. 5.2.
Appendix - Instruments
Monitoring and evaluation of Family Friendly good practices di Elisabetta Carr Guidelines for a plan to monitor and evaluate the quality of actions di Stefania Meda
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AVSI Italia 20158 Milano Via Legnone, 4 tel. +39 02 6749881 milano@avsi.org 47521 Cesena (FC) Via Padre Vicinio da Sarsina, 216 tel. +39 0547 360811 cesena@avsi.org
AVSI USA Headquarters:125 Maiden Lane, 15th floor New York, NY 10038 DC Office: 529 14th Street NW Suite 994 Washington, DC 20045 Ph/Fax: +1.202.429.9009 infoavsi-usa@avsi.org www.avsi-usa.org
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6.1.
Who we are
Method
Introduction

Benedetta Fontana, AVSI
Referring to the Family as a beauty is in itself a stance taken. In our case this is neither an ideological nor theoretical opinion, but a declaration backed by experience: this debate has made it clear, on one side, that the propaganda of a mentality contrary to the family disseminated by use of the media (movies, television, newspapers), even though with such powerful means could not prevent many people from still having a positive experience of family. In front of such an impressively powerful ideological attack, it might appear inevitable for the family to cease being interesting. On the contrary, there is a fact that we must recognize almost with surprise: such an impressive apparatus has shown itself to be less powerful than the elementary experience that many of us have lived within our own families, the ineradicable experience of a good. A good that we are grateful for, and that we want to pass on to the future generations in order that it might be shared.1 In the case of the AVSI projects, this declaration becomes tangible evidence that calls for action: put simply, where a family exists, working with end users (generally children and youngsters) brings infinitely better results. This is the case, for example, of the OVC2 Programme funded by American cooperation USAID in the Great Lakes region in Africa, which has shown how a family-centric model is a winning approach in care and education of children3. The same is proven by all the work carried out by AVSI in the fight against childhood malnutrition in various countries, published in the paperback Nourishing People, Feeding Hope4, from which we learn, among other things, that a childs nutrition levels really only improve when a family recuperates its capacity for total care of the child. Experience gleaned from a great many educational projects leads us to the same conclusion: where families are involved and present, children participate better and more, learn more and develop more completely. Families in this sense means as they are, as we find them and they come to us in different contexts, at times a mother on
Julin Carrn, The experience of the family, a beauty to be conquered once again: meeting organised by the Milan Centre for Culture during the Milan Diocese Week of Culture 2009. http://www.tracce.it/detail.asp?c=1&p=0&id=526 2 OVC Programme Orphan and Vulnerable Children Funded by USAID and carried out by AVSI from 2005 to 2010 in Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya, providing medical and education assistance to 14,000 orphans and vulnerable children and their families, also through relations with and reinforcement of 114 local partner organisations. In 2008, in response to a request by USAID, the AVSI OVC project expanded to include the Ivory Coast. OVC, the programme for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, thanks to encounters with each of the children has also come to stand for Our Valuable Children. 3 For detailed information about the OVC programme see www.avsi.org in the documents and press and publications section 4 Paperback Nourishing people, feeding hope,www.avsi.org in the press and publications section
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Eugenia Scabini, Dean of the Faculty of Psychology, Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan Giovanna Rossi, Full Professor of Sociology of the family, Faculty of Psychology, Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan
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her own, at others a father, a grandmother or a relative who is present, who becomes a resource. These premises have fuelled our desire to work on the family across different kinds of projects from urban and social development to malnutrition, from the development of farming to shelters, from educational to health projects. The underlying question guiding our reflections is given that the family can be a great resource, how can we make the most of this, involving and supporting it? How can this asset be brought to the fore, promoted and defended? The method, once again, is to start with our experience, understand, study, observe and evaluate it and then go back to this experience with an added value that is the very fruit of this reflection, in other words what we have learnt from our experience. In this way, it will be possible to offer practical help, improving projects thanks to what we know: judgement and evaluation of a practice become an experience of knowledge. This publication tells of three AVSI projects that see the family as an asset that must be used to the full, and this positive outlook is a starting point for all these experiences, for rethinking social and educational intervention for children and youngsters. The three case histories were chosen as examples of much broader work done by AVSI worldwide, in 40 countries, always in contexts of great poverty and generally characterised by a breakdown of family links. The description of experiences on three continents and in different cultural contexts (Burundi in Africa, Ecuador in Latin America and Romania in Eastern Europe) are intended in a certain sense to be representative of all the numerous attempts that in completely different settings apply the same method, fruit of evaluation of the person involved (the beneficiary, whomever that may be) seen as part of his or her primary relationships (family and reference community). These are experiences that provide a new vision of the family, a viewpoint that enhances, seeks out and rebuilds family links where they still exist, suggesting new links and relationships that are reliable, trustworthy and as far-reaching as possible, open to new ideas and difference and ready to start over even after failure. The process of knowledge, judgement, evaluation and reflection on practices was guided by Eugenia Scabini5 and Giovanna Rossi6, university professors at the Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. They enriched and completed the case histories by offering their wide-ranging conceptual and cultural base, enabling us to rethink our actions and relaunch the projects themselves with a new, broader outlook. The added value is not just the rethinking and therefore the possibility to improve actions based on judgement, but also and above all the ability to generate in the actors involved a capacity for reflection about themselves and their lives, starting with their past actions. Furthermore, rereading of the practices by Eugenia Scabini and Giovanna Rossi gave rise to an important question:
How to monitor and evaluate, with which tools and which goals, the projects that work with families, so that evaluation increasingly becomes an experience of knowledge, possibility of judgement and critical systematic reflection about the experience? Thanks to help from Ms. Stefania Meda, the book concludes with a short in-depth analysis of the monitoring and evaluation of good practices in our work with families. This intends to also provide effective support for operators at work in the various countries so that, with the use of tools that can then be adapted to the different local realities, they can monitor their actions in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability (but also replicability, ethical quality of the aims and social capital), highlighting the real needs that the projects attempt to meet.
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The experience in Burundi
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1.1. Introduction
The Meo Centre (Mamans, enfants et orphelins) was set up in 2002, in Cibitoke, one of the seven Northern districts in the peripheral suburbs of the capital city of Bujumbura, where AVSI has rented premises thanks to funds from sponsorship and contributions by Friends of the Biella Aid Association, Comunit Biellese Aiuti Umanitari. The centre was founded to meet the need for a shared protected place for children, mothers and war orphans in the capitals suburbs. The children and families chosen for sponsorship were identified as those in the Northern districts, some of the worst hit by the civil war (1993-2005), in an attempt to provide a tangible response to the emergencies and needs of this area, in terms of food, health assistance, education and psychological aid. Work by this centre therefore started during a period of partial post conflict, characterised by great urban decay, with high levels of overpopulation due to the great influx of Burundian refugees who, time and again, flooded into the capital as they fled from ethnic cleansing and to a complete breakdown of the family, social and community fabric in general and to structures for health, school and social psychological assistance that are totally inadequate for the needs of a seriously traumatised people. The Centre today: the Centro Meo Lino Lava (named after CBAU member Mr. Lava, now dead, who started up the enterprise and friendship scheme to support the centres activities), has moved and, while still in the same district, is now housed in new premises, completely rebuilt thanks to funds from Comunit Biellese Aiuti Umanitari and to collaboration with the Burundian authorities in Bujumbura, which granted AVSI use of the building land.
Disorganisation in the countrys various public sectors and high levels of corruption Lack of associations and of mechanisms for community solidarity Ignorance of human and childrens rights
In more detail, the families we work with usually live with no basic hygiene (open-air sewers, widespread refuse, lack of drinkable water), in cramped conditions for the number of inhabitants, with one room serving an average of eight people, leading to consequent promiscuity between adults and children. Roofs are often sheets of plastic that do not offer suitable protection during the rainy season, leading to flooding of the living areas. Any toilets are outside and consist of a hole in the ground under a straw roof, shared with neighbours. There is usually no electricity and any lighting tends to be provided by wood fires or, sporadically, oil lamps. Families that are part of the sponsorship scheme have different origins. Many of them arrived in the city during the war years, leaving behind their land and farming work to flee the ethnic massacres in the country, mainly from the northern provinces of Kayanza and Ngozi and from rural Bujumbura. The adults in these families, often widows who lost their husbands in the war, therefore found themselves without work and often forced to beg to survive, unable to return to their community of origin because of the loss of their land, general insecurity and the numerous disputes over land in the post-war era. The women work in rice paddies or sell small quantities of fruit and vegetables with daily earnings never in excess of 40 euro cents. Other families come from the northern districts, most are widows or women whose husbands/partners have abandoned them to form new families, leaving them to bring up their children alone. They mainly sell fruit and vegetables at the market, buy and sell coal or grow small quantities of crops (rice, lengalenga and tomatoes). A typical family consists of a mother and maternal or paternal grandmother. Fathers, even when alive, are conspicuous by their absence in most families. The mother is the only adult responsible for procuring daily food, educating and bringing up the children. In the case of children who live with a tutor (male or female) the family is usually made up of maternal or paternal uncles and aunts, grandparents or distant relatives of the family of origin and again the role of the woman is fundamental for the childrens survival and education. Families in the northern districts generally live in a culture of violence and nonrespect of civil rules, linked in part to the only recently abolished obligatory recruitment of youngsters both by guerrilla movements and the regular army. The population continues to experience a sense of insecurity, there is no freedom of speech or thought and vendetta is on the increase, leading to an even tenser among institutional figures
1.2. Background
The Cibitoke district is today a peripheral urban area, with a high level of generalised decay and poverty (68% of the population is below the poverty line according to the 2009 UNDP estimate) caused mainly by the following factors: High population growth (fecundity levels of 6.33 children per woman) General insecurity linked to ethnic conflicts and violence Need for reconciliation between the parties that have been at war for all these years Post-war economic crisis High unemployment Continual influx into the city from the countryside with people looking for work and repatriated refugees or people evacuated from one province to another High rate of adult illiteracy (47% > 18 years of age) HIV (affecting a large percentage of the population > 16%) Lack of adequate public services (health, education and social) and limited access Increase in the prices of basic products and services and low purchase power of the population
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social situation. People are being killed every day in the northern districts, not only for stealing but also for private vendettas, political motives and ethical issues with strong links that are hard to decipher. Furthermore, gradual disarming of the population and rebels is far from completed and there is in fact an ongoing situation of increasing possession of weapons. Despite this negative picture, the population in question is, in some aspects, rich, having traditional knowledge, social links and work skills. The value of the family is the centre of a seriously damaged social fabric and there is little trust between individuals, even when these are neighbours or family members. The family represents an extra chance of survival in life and in this sense the extended family is the local cultural answer to the phenomenon of the high number of orphans due to the war and the HIV epidemic. Often in fact, children are entrusted to aunts, grandmothers or sisters when parents are alive but unable to support large families. The role of these family relatives is crucial for our work with families, to be considered a
central aspect for development and strengthening of the childs existing network of relations. To date there are still many shortcomings in this direction and apart from a few cases of family reunification that we followed closely, we are still studying how to better use and develop these family figures as resources to flank the original family nucleus. The main difficulties lie above all in relation to family rights contrasting with Burundian cultural customs that are often hostile to external intervention. One example of Burundian tradition that is still in force is the family council, an informal body that meets to make important family decisions, made up of wise men and elders, who often carry more weight than the apposite institutional bodies. The Burundian family is patriarchal in structure and the females play secondary roles to the males. The man, the head of the family, decides and manages the familys money even when he does not work and it is the woman who provides for the needs and care of the children. The woman often submits passively and there are a great many cases of domestic and sexual violence, linked also to the widespread problem of male alcoholism, the scarcity of official reports due to a fear of vendetta and the fact that Burundians hold the mother responsible if her underage daughter is the victim of violence. The most widespread attitude is incrimination of the victim with blame for the violence laid on the females behaviour or clothes. A woman repudiated by her community is turned out of her home and forced to fend for herself, often ending up completely destitute. In answer to the widespread problem of the lack of a father figure in the families that we encounter, the centre is a place for different kinds of family intermediation. First of all, monthly meetings are held to raise awareness about the family as a unit, education of children, etc., with the childrens parents/tutors, with the aim of increasing the presence and involvement of the men in question in the educational path proposed by the centre for their children. As well as raising awareness with the adults, we also hold periodic encounters with the boys who attend the centre in an attempt to create educational exchange on issues such as respect for the sexes, respect for women, the fight against sexual violence with the aim of focusing on changing the mindset of the new male generations in the hope that they themselves will then take these messages into their families and create a chain effect. We also seek out good examples of fathers and use their case histories to try and involve more reticent fathers. Direct testimony is therefore a privileged tool that we are trying to make more use of and that has greater potential than other forms of intervention currently used. In general the family enjoys great respect in the Burundian society, marriage is its basis and unmarried couples are frowned upon, the bride price (a sum of money or goods given by the future groom to the brides family) is a widespread custom
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and a woman who leaves her family to marry someone unable to pay the bride price, is considered to have dishonoured her family and is alienated. This is the norm for families having sufficient finances, while for the ones we work with the situation is very different, as most of them do not involve marriage and therefore offer no protection either for the woman or any children born out of the relationship. Women in Burundi have no inheritance rights either and even when married, have very few rights compared to their husbands. Another aspect is that of young girls in the northern districts who run away from home to go and live with older, married men who promise them a better lifestyle, only to abandon the girls on the streets not long after. This is all aggravated by prostitution. Many girls and some childrens mothers who are part of the project end up as prostitutes to earn money to feed their children and, unfortunately, even parents themselves encourage their daughters to become prostitutes to help the family. Currently our efforts for greater family involvement in this problem concentrate on raising awareness, talk groups, counselling by operators on home visits and sessions with the psychologist at the centre. We are not yet providing more focused intervention aimed to concretelly help families to rebuild their unity and identity. The families and children that we meet at the centre are therefore part of a general picture that sees family breakdown and the persistence of some negative cultural practices, mentioned above, as the main problems to be tackled. We encounter many different needs: Dietary. Inadequate or insufficient food with cases of malnutrition and resistance to changes in existing dietary habits (e.g. fruit is practically absent because it is not considered important) Psychological. There are numerous cases of children traumatised by the conflicts Physical and/or mental handicaps and HIV-positivity Educational. There are numerous cases of non-attendance and dropouts Sexual violence on minors and young women and the impunity of aggressors Young unmarried mothers Women subject to domestic violence by husbands/partners Hygiene conditions linked to ignorance about basic hygiene rules Ignorance of human and childrens rights Traditional informal system for regulating conflicts (e.g. the family of the victim of violence comes to an agreement with the family of the aggressor, the latter paying a sum of money or goods) Ignorance of laws regarding fundamental human rights Lack of the spirit of small enterprise Entrusting of orphaned children to tutors who are not legally recognised Family abandonment and children becoming the heads of their families.
1.3. The centre

The educational approach for the centres activity is based on the five points of the AVSI method (page 90) and involves the children and families with direct participation. 406 children and families are involved, assisted by seven social workers, who include: 1 centre manager who coordinates and supervises all the educational and recreational activities and is responsible for personnel management 1 psychologist who gives counselling sessions and organises and holds psycho-therapeutic sessions and talk groups for the children and their parents/tutors 1 social assistant mainly responsible for micro-credit for the childrens parents/tutors 3 social workers who accompany children and families along an educational path of individual development, with visits to families, schools and monthly meetings with parents/tutors 1 social educator in charge of organising and supervising recreational and musical activity.
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How the social operator works depends on the activities carried out, with social assistants mainly reporting to the field manager for everything concerning activities carried out in the field, while activities in the centre are organised and monitored by the centre manager. Every week I organize a staff meeting for discussion of our calendar of activities, definition of priorities and deadlines, troubleshooting
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and sharing of our experiences with the daily effectiveness of our method in tackling the problems of families and the children. Every month I also organise a meeting with all the staff to analyse difficult cases, looking for solutions together and assessing whether the way we operate is opportune for the case in question. We use a participatory method with the aim of stimulating the participation and responsibility of each member of staff. We also organise exchange days on the 5 points of the AVSI method to strengthen our sense of belonging to a common cause, to make it our own and take on board the principles that guide us, so that we do not forget the reason behind our daily actions, above all for better management of urgency-related anxiety. Staff lack competence in terms of preparation, linked in part to the quality of their schooling and education. The educational level in Burundi is generally low and despite our operators having attended social science schools and university courses in psychology, they have limited, outdated theoretical knowledge. It must also be considered that they themselves have experienced and suffered the consequences of the conflict with all relative trauma and that very often they have received no psychological support to help them overcome this. Activities by the centre can be divided into five big sectors: education recreational, medical-health, food, psycho-social and development.
School visits by social assistants to monitor childrens progress and problems Raise awareness with families about issues such as individual rights, domestic
and sexual violence, the value of the family, pacific resolution of conflicts etc. to create opportunities for exchange and gain better knowledge of the families that we work with and their problems Talk groups for children and families, held every month, to provide counselling with problems and fears of both parents and children. Group sessions are held by the psychologist at the centre to gain better knowledge of the life of people and to put together a plan of action, and to find a way of being accepted by the family in order to share an educational path for the children Legal guardianship for children in serious situations a recent pilot activity for informing them about their rights, orientation, the right to impartial defence and raising awareness to help victims report their aggressors Exchange days with social assistants about the 5 points of the AVSI method, to involve them in the work done and to praise their work with the children and families.
Payment of medical treatment and transport for children and, in serious cases,
Medical - health
Number of children/families registered with the Centre: 416, including 20 men Total number of boys and girls attending activities at the Centre: 416 with sponsorship and 400 without. Educational - recreational out of a total of 396 women, 224 boys and 192 girls
Our library with educational support from the social workers To allow children to start reading, to stimulate their interest and curiosity for
of their parents/tutors, when they are admitted to hospital, to help them access health services Distribution of health and hygiene supplies together with specific education regarding the value and importance of hygiene as a preventive measure for many common diseases and to teach personal hygiene as a way of personal enhancement Distribution of food and emergency supplies for families with critical health and food problems in order to support the family during difficult periods.
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new knowledge, to improve their level of comprehension and to organise afterschool activities and remedial lessons Group games based on the play therapy experience, through book creation Dancing and singing with courses held by the social educator to keep good Burundian traditions alive, to create group spirit, to help them grow self-confidence and personal capacities Drum courses held by the social educator to recuperate the positive values of this Burundian tradition, to help free expression through recognition of a system of rules and strengthen a sense of community identity and belonging Theatre and poetry with the organisation of sketches, to make children aware of issues such as the rights of children, the school, peace and reunification, the fight against violence, HIV, etc. through active participation as protagonists of everyday reality with shows put on in primary and secondary schools to transmit these messages to other youngsters and arouse their interest
Home visits by social workers who on average visit families twice a year unless
Psycho - social
Granting of fifty micro credits, individual and collective and support (small
Development
enterprise, farming activity) for the creation of small income-earning busi-
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the child or family reports serious problems to get to know the family situation and understand what the needs of each particular family are Counselling at the centre with the psychologist (an average of 93 sessions a month) who is there for children to give them advice, support and moral guidance. The children can either request an individual session spontaneously or be guided by social assistants recommendations. During the coordination meeting that I hold at the centre, we dedicate one day to difficult cases for better organisation of psychological support.
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nesses, to stimulate a spirit of small enterprise and to create a path that leads the sponsored childs family to recover their confidence in their own capacity for self-support. The families are selected through prior assessment of the micro project presented to the social assistant in charge who uses an assessment sheet to note strong and weak points and any experience in the activity for which they are requesting the loan.
1.4. Ongoing case histories

On this subject we would like to mention two stories of children/families, examples of a typical family and its problems. When we met Juliette (fictitious name), her situation was dramatic. Both her father and mother were dead and she was HIV-positive, living with her elderly grandmother who was desperate about her granddaughters medical condition. The grandmother had lost all her children and had no other living relatives apart from Juliette. The girl had become deeply depressed on the death of her parents, she hardly spoke, was absent and apathetic to any stimulation. She attended primary school only periodically and as a consequence her progress was intermittent and poor. The social assistant at the centre started to follow this case initially by gaining the trust of the girls grandmother, meeting her often at the centre, giving her information about the girls illness and explaining that life expectation had improved thanks to existing therapies and that it is possible to live positively despite the virus. The grandmother was then directed to a specific HIV patient health structure where she took part in awareness-raising courses and where she received advice on how to tackle the situation at home. The advice and attention received permitted the grandmother to find new hope and not feel alone in this difficult situation. After this, the grandmother asked the social assistant to be allowed to set up a small income-generating project in order to improve her living conditions and those of her granddaughter. She was therefore loaned a small amount of money with which she was able to set up a stall selling cooked peanuts, mangoes and sweets, which provided for her daily food. Juliette was urged to socialise with the other children at the centre and little by little she started to play and open up. Today she is part of the centres dance group and is well-integrated. Thanks to encouragement from the social assistants she has improved her school results and has regained confidence in her capacities, looking beyond the illness. Marie (fictitious name) came into contact with the centre when she was still a little girl and had moved with her family from a province in the south of the country to the northern districts of Bujumbura in the nineties to escape from the ethnic massacres ongoing in the country. When they arrived in the capital, they
spent several months in a refugee camp, where it was forbidden to speak, life was dominated by fear and living conditions were very harsh. During her time in the camp, Marie had lost all her positive attitude to life and her vulnerability was at its peak. Then, thanks to sponsorship, she came into contact with the centre in 2001. The social assistants listened to her, supported her and encouraged her to start to hope, to look to the future and take responsibility for change. Her family was helped and Marie started going to back to school until a traumatic event that happened to her in 2006, when she was raped by a boy on her way home from school. A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant and did not know how to face this problem, especially because the Burundian culture sees the victim as the guilty party instead of the one needing help. The family would have had the same problem because this incident would have been regarded as dishonour and they would have kicked her out. At this point, the social assistant approached the family, building positive dialogue and tackling the problem with them and managed to get a positive result. Today Marie has a
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beautiful three-year-old son, thanks to sponsorship has started back at school and is now in fifth year high with good results.
1.5. Advantages and disadvantages of the centre

The centre represents a great opportunity due, in the first instance, to the fact that its shared protected area offers children and families positive educational experiences that would be impossible outside, making it easy for us to meet the families and establish a relationship with them, listening to their needs and difficulties, thus creating a deeper and more personalised path of awareness that forms the basis for a relationship. The centre is an oasis of peace for children-oriented activities, set against an external background of violence and is somewhere for children to play, experiment, learn and receive a positive educational model. An experience of order, attention and affection that will indirectly also affect the childrens families. The centre would like to be seen as a second home for the children and their families, with no intention of replacing the educational role of the family but working with the family to enhance this, seeing it as a positive resource for society itself and as a way of giving back deserved dignity and identity. The disadvantages of the centre, on the other hand, are linked to the fact that it makes social assistants lazy, as they tend not to increase the number of home visits because children and families can be invited to the centre, thus losing sight of the importance of visits in the setting where the child lives and gains its experience. Home visits in fact give us better understanding of the familys problems and a better idea of the reality explained by the children and families involved. We monitor projects set up for sponsored child-related activities by recording the number of children who received a given activity in a certain period of time (e.g. scholastic material distributed, number of meals distributed, etc.) while on a quality level the childs psycho-social evolution is monitored with visits severy six months. The tool used is a sponsorship monitor form on which the social worker records the childs positive and/or negative changes and the familys initial situation (see attachment). Meanwhile monitoring of family-oriented activities, apart from granting of microcredit for which we are able to assess short-term impact, is not carried out because we have not yet put in place a system that allows us to record the results of our intervention, except in individual cases.
(psycho-social module, play therapy, value of life, etc.), together with specific microcredit training for both the social assistant and the families involved, the possibility of exchanging best experiences in countries where AVSI has achieved concrete results for constructive sharing. More in general, investment in human capital to build a path that allows for personal and professional growth in their relationship above all with themselves and then with the sponsored families and children Greater investment in the family as a resource for the centre and for the external community, as a nucleus on which to base responses to problems and the daily needs of its members, through improvement of reception and educational content of activities at the centre Assessment of the feasibility of using resources from other groups/local organisations, where the centre works with the aim of strengthening the local players capacities for greater sustainability of future work by the centre Improvement of our approach and method with families for creating a scenario of free collaboration, responsibility and trust in the work carried out by the centre Involvement of men in family-oriented activities, husbands, fathers and brothers, making them protagonists within the family and in the educational path of their children, focussing on the young men as the turning point for a future generational change extended to the reference community. Without their direct involvement the good results of our work are often at risk and not sustainable for the family itself.
More funds at our disposal for the creation of a nutrition centre. We currently
Material resources
distribute two meals a week, but without a real educational path upstream to support this activity for mothers and children. Only 20% of the potential space in the centre is used for this purpose More funds at our disposal for the organisation of exchange days between the Burundian social staff and staff in bordering countries (Rwanda, RDC, Kenya) More personnel working at the centre and also, starting with new sponsorship, an attempt to create more standardised local groups in order not to waste the energy and work done in a very fragmented territory.
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Creation and strengthening of collaboration with local partners to make best use
of their knowledge of local culture and family dynamics and creation of a path of community solidarity through involvement of volunteers from the community, but above all with a view to future sustainability of the centre post AVSI Strengthening of our relationships with local authorities to involve them in work by the centre Streamlining of our work by inserting each project into a wider picture with international players
Knowledge, competences and capacities
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1.6. What we need in order to improve

Many points have arisen from work in the field that show us how we could improve work done by the centre. These are just some of the most important: Human resources and continual training courses for social operators and the coordinator
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Collaboration with schools through direct relationships with teachers and The support of a nutrition expert who can guide us in dietary education Putting the questions and needs of the families themselves first and not setting out Creation and activation of networks between families at the centre, through
with preconceived personal reasoning encounters and experiences of the families involved, a model to show that they have brought about positive change thanks to our support and the centre, in order to encourage direct involvement of other families, which starts on a cultural level that is closer to their daily difficulties, to make the childrens families responsible for and pro-active in their educational path and values put forward by the centre Improvement in our capacity to involve families in psychological counselling. headmasters
2
The experience in Ecuador
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2.1. Introduction
AVSIs activity in Ecuador, together with its local counterparts, has from the start (2001) been through a special programme, Pelca (Prescolar en la Casa, which originated in Galizia and was taken to Ecuador by Don Dario Maggi) particularly in favour of the family. Using this programme, the aim from the very beginning was to help parents recognise and develop fully their childrens capabilities, through reflections on daily life and on the more important themes for the growth and education of children. The content of meetings with parents (mostly fortnightly, sometimes monthly or weekly) is the stimulus and incentive for what parents will continue at home. In the meetings, specific questions are discussed, such as child development and nutrition, but also wider topics, such as family value and marital relations, which are often a source of huge problems. The meeting groups (6/7 parents per group) are stable, in order to encourage acquaintance and trust among members and the growth of positive relationships between the adults. Since 2005 in Ecuador AVSI has run the AEDI (Integrated Education Action) programme, along with two local counterparts (Vicaria de Educacion in rural areas and Fundacion Sembrar in urban ones). Currently more than a thousand families are involved in the programme about 400 in urban areas and 700 in rural zones, for a total of 1700 children and accompanied teenagers. It should be noted that, as of 2005, both in rural and urban areas and following the development of the Pelca programme (which continues in its original form for about 600 local children), various kinds of involvement and activities have developed, all with the aim of helping and educating children by supporting their families. Such intervention includes: a dozen or so nurseries and playgroups that have sprung up both in urban and rural zones in order to allow parents to go to work; after school groups - the educators means of helping children and parents to fulfil the necessary obligations associated with school attendance; educational activities with about 200 adolescents; and some small productive activities for parents. The urban and the rural contexts often have very diverse characteristics. In this document we shall refer to these two areas separately, with their specific differences, which also impact AVSIs intervention.
social structure. The entire responsibility for education lies with the mothers. As far as regards our work, we distinguish 3 groups of mothers and consequently of families with which we are concerned: Unmarried mothers, that is to say, young women who at the age of 13/14, out of curiosity, in a search for affection and often in a bid to escape, begin to have their first sexual experiences. Among young people there is a general lack of appreciation of the value of loving relationships and little education towards self-control. About 15% of children in AVSIs programme are offspring of unmarried mothers. In such cases, it is the grandparents (extended family) who take decisions and are concerned with the childs education. Our work, in general, is not directed towards all family members without distinction, nor necessarily to the mother, but to the person who takes care of the childs education. Through this person, in many cases, the other members are reached. Even when the mothers are not living with the fathers, very often they begin to inform him and so he becomes gradually involved. Another category of mothers is that of mothers who are separated from their husbands: about 5%. In these cases, the mothers are the main breadwinners and work hard. Our contact become an aunt or uncle perhaps more adult who looks after the child during the day, but who does not live with him. Another category, the remaining and most common one, is that of informal or free unions, in a small percentage of which (about 5%) the father of the household is not the natural father. In the majority of cases he makes no economic contribution, nor does he have anything to do with his acquired childs education. Over the years, we have seen that the first step is to involve the mothers. Gradually, then, the dads begin to take part in the regular educational meetings of the mothers mostly out of interest and curiosity in seeing their wives change and especially on their days off (Saturday). This is the case of about 10% of our dads and is especially so when the children reach an age to start primary school. Sometimes, the fathers do not take part in meetings, but seek out educators during the week to share with them various types of family problems, often concerning the couple, as if they were seeking moral support. This is the case of about 10% of our dads. Other times, especially in rural areas and where participation is high, they attend twice yearly evening meetings, where they feel free to speak of educational and family problems from a male point-ofview. In recent years, in the rural areas, their organisational and constructive contributions to initiatives has been highly valued, where working ability is necessary (e.g. to erect buildings for educational activities) and particularly in agricultural activities, under a programme to create family or community vegetable gardens, intended to improve the familys and above all, the childrens eating habits. As far as other family members are concerned, some of them become the necessary contact for the childs education under the AVSI programme. Very often this person is one of the grandparents, when parents are absent for various reasons (emigration, separation, work, very young mother). In this case, the grandmothers especially
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2.2. The context and AVSIs intervention

Below we consider the characteristics and specific difficulties of the context faced by the programme in past years, and the ways of responding that were found. The mother figure as first point-of-contact In our activities focussed on the family, our most important point-of-contact is undoubtedly the mother. In general, in Ecuadorian society, the fathers are not involved in the life and education of their children. This void is found in all of the countrys
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take part in meetings, and educational intervention is focussed on making sure the natural mother does not lose educational contact with her child. In urban areas, for example, this means the mother contacting the educator once a month. In the specific case of children being looked after by grandparents due to migration or separation of the parents, the infrequent visits and family conflicts often make it impossible for the educator to maintain contact with the natural mother. So the grandparents or aunts and uncles who take care of the child become the key contact for educational intervention. Grandparents, older married siblings, aunts and uncles and neighbours are therefore very often supportive figures, though they do not live with the child, as also is the family abroad (emigrants). When the child is first registered, the educator identifies and also registers this person or persons. Throughout the year, the educator encourages the family to activate this resource, especially in case of need such as health problems, daytime child care, economic support or emergencies in case of a violent husband. Sometimes, these are the people who become mediators, enabling us to reach the family when contact is difficult. They can also be a source of precious information for better understanding of a situation, especially in small rural communities. It should be said that sometimes support figures are already involved in AVSI activities (often these are the same people who originally told the family about AVSI activities and the possibility of involvement) and they are in touch with AVSI operators, taking part in normal activities. In other cases, they are punctually present for special occasions, e.g. at parties (maximum 3 times per year: for children, for mothers and end-of-year). The common mentality of womans inferiority to man Particularly in urban areas, there is a widespread mentality of female inferiority, which is reflected in many aspects of our educational activity. Urban areas One of the most critical aspects of the urban context is the widespread macho mentality leading at worst to violence against women. Among other things, this deprives women in general of personal goals. According to the macho mentality, the woman must stay at home, not only to carry out household duties, but also because of her husbands jealousy. Generally, men do not want their wife to continue studying (perhaps to avoid potential inferiority complexes) and/or work. On the one hand, this stems from a need to take care of the children, on the other, from fear of women becoming independent. It is acceptable for wives to work only for economic reasons (when the husbands income is not enough to maintain the family). This mentality, added to the common problem of alcoholism, above all, among men, often results in episodes of physical or verbal violence: as well as being assaulted, women are often insulted even in front of their children and accused of being the cause of all the familys problems. This phenomenon is so widespread that many women consider it normal both to be maltreated and to abandon their personal ambitions regarding study and/or work. It is important to note that this problem of violence has become more recognised in recent years, since women have only begun to open up and talk about it, once a relationship of trust has grown up with the educators. To deal with this question, several initiatives have been taken: appreciation of healthy husband/wife relationships by means of formal testimony during end-of-year events and more spontaneous testimony during meetings, in order to give families a positive vision, that can be an example to other households; involvement of fathers (who are often difficult to reach their employment, though temporary and poorly paid, does usually exist) together with their wives, for example, to football matches, inviting the wives to cheer them, and to meetings which are deliberately held on Saturdays so that fathers may attend. The idea is not so much to take sides on the question of violence or alcoholism, but rather to place value on already-existing positive aspects (the couple) that might become an example to others, as a possible way of interacting. At the moment, however, there is still little room, and only sporadically, for this type of activity within the programme, due to the fathers lack of available time. Last year, moreover, parents training was concentrated precisely around this theme of the family and how it is supported. This may have contributed to the unexpected discovery that the problem of mistreatment and violence was fairly serious among our
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collaborators too (90% of whom come from the areas where we operate). We therefore decided to concentrate our attention on them, by giving them opportunities for training and study, showing them a possible horizon through readings on the subject and meetings (3 per year) with friends. This year we also tried a Sunday outing for couples (our collaborators and their husbands). This was a chance to socialise and to get to know each other, as well as for confrontation through experiences and group work around the theme of marital relations, etc Following this outing, for some months we have been considering whether the experience should be repeated, without excluding (as in the first outing) our collaborators (often unmarried mothers) who do not have husbands or partners. Our common consensus is that the question of marriage and its connected difficulties cannot be faced outside of the central question of the individual and of personal responsibility. Rural areas It should be pointed out that in Ecuador there is a difference not so much between town and country, as between geographic zones (Costa and Sierra). In the coastal region, women are inferior to a lesser degree. Despite this, in the Costa too, our programme has had to face the problem of a widespread mentality of female inferiority and the scarce involvement of fathers in educating children, only in part complicated by underlying machismo. At the start of the programme, for example, obstacles were raised to the mothers participation in training meetings and, apart from initiatives already indicated in the previous point, the problem was challenged on various fronts: Involving fathers in activities of creating or cultivating community or family vegetable gardens, with the triple aim of: improving family diet, earning a little additional income and bringing them closer to the programme and to understanding its wider significance, not only concerning childrens education but education for all, improving family conditions and community participation Deliberately avoiding hiring only female educators. This, as well as for logistic purposes (some communities, due to their isolation and distance, are easier reached by male rather than female educators), also for educational needs: a male educator has demonstrated, more than a thousand words, that men too can educate, with the special characteristics, naturally, of their sex. Furthermore, this has taught not a few husbands to trust their own wife Creating training occasions where the fathers participation is explicitly required, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife obviously in the evening, to encourage participation on questions especially connected with family and marital dynamics, on relationships both with wives and with children. The methodology tried to date has been dialogue following watching a film or film excerpts on the subject. The encounters organised in rural areas (the most populated communities) have given very interesting results, with the discovery that fathers want these occasions (perhaps not too often) because they feel considered for their own special characteristics. This has made us wonder whether sometimes we risk creating a vicious circle
by ourselves: given that fathers are not interested, we invite (and we endeavour to create favourable conditions) the participation of the mothers. Lack of social connections outside of the family The problem of male dominance, both in urban and rural zones, is compounded by the almost total lack of social contact outside of the family, especially for women. many have no friends and only see their neighbours. It is not common to invite friends home or to spend time with other families. Chances for meeting others are generally limited to neighbourhood meetings, to communal work also for the neighbourhood, or to some sporting activity. Men have more contacts outside of the family, but these are generally of a very superficial nature. Nobody, however, has a point of reference, a person in whom to confide their worries and who will support them, that is outside of the family. So many women live with their problems and worries, often in profound solitude. Urban areas To address this problem and to encourage formation of networks among the families, 3 years ago in the urban area a meeting room was started (somewhere to meet freely and informally). This initiative, however, came up against several problems, owing to lack of interest and continuative assistance. Later about 2 years ago a club of collaborators/mothers was started, with selected mothers who were more involved in project activities, to allow them a chance for human education and recreational activities together. Last year a small group of collaborator-mothers (5) was selected for special training (cookery courses, costume jewellery, chocolate making). This group is currently setting up a micro-enterprise, assisted by the programme. In parallel with these initiatives and also within the educational programme offered to families and with the aim of improving their social network, during the past 2 years, some solidarity activities have been proposed (collecting food and used clothes for poorer families in the neighbourhood), which have attracted great participation from the families. In recent months we have learned of a series of supportive initiatives among families in the form of specific help in case of need and in difficult moments (concerning food and clothing), discreet and spontaneous actions, conceived by the families themselves. It should also be noted that more and more families join the programme because they are invited by other families. Some other small activities were freely organised this year among mothers in the programme. In particular, a group of 7 mothers meets regularly (every month and a half) to cook together, others prepare with their children the manual tasks to be handed to educators at the meetings. Another network level in the urban area is one functioning today among people who work with AVSI, many of whom started as beneficiaries, almost all originiating from the neighbourhoods where we work. A case in point are the 5 women who run the family nurseries or others who increasingly frequently meet outside working hours to eat or study together.
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improvement plan that is decided and agreed together. For our programme, the Groups of Family Representatives at this time are our most effective instrument for creating operative links between families and stimulating them to embrace aims and accept responsibility for the sustainability and continuity of the programme itself: propagation of the programme and awareness-raising among other families, information about initiatives concerning hygiene and improving living spaces, construction and maintenance of communal play and learning areas for infants, coordination and control of carrying out of various initiatives (vaccination campaign, prevention of childish ailments and promotion of family health, campaign for use of registry office).
2.3. Innovative and methodological aspects of work done

In the light of the context and types of response described, the following points of operative methods, which are most innovative in work with families, can be discerned - points clearly connected and derived from AVSIs 5 points of method (page 90). The families are protagonists An innovative and distinctive point of AVSIs work in Ecuador in these years is without doubt the leading role entrusted to parents concerning the education of their own children. Over the years, as systematic evaluation has also shown, a change has gradually emerged concerning the very aim of educational activity, that is to say, more attention and responsibility towards children, up to a different allocation of time on the part of fathers, expressed in sharing household tasks and free time. In the urban area, for those directly involved in the educative task, greater family unity, or a desire for it, can be noticed, right up to the decision to stabilise a relationship. In the rural zone, it should be mentioned that initially the programme had to face a very welfare state mentality, further encouraged by government social policies. There, emphasis was placed particularly on community initiative, voluntary work and self-management of activities, especially the construction and maintenance of learning spaces (meeting rooms), set up at the suggestion and with voluntary contributions of some families. In this sense, many parents were given a chance of direct and responsible participation, which then led to the development of a much stronger feeling of belonging, to feeling personally involved in the construction of the programme. The educators as protagonists Another innovative aspect of the experience is the involvement in working with families of families, or family members, from the projects area of influence. In the urban area, participation is almost entirely female, while in the rural area women count for only 60%. In this sense, the most important methodological point is the clear invitation to educa-
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Rural area In the rural area, although training meetings for many mothers represent a point of reference and a chance to exchange ideas, this does not seem sufficient to consolidate social connections, especially as meetings are still seen in many cases as carrying out a duty/requirement of the programme. From 2008, therefore, occasions were created to challenge the womens freedom: for example, dressmaking courses with the subsequent creation of a group of mothers who might use the newly-learned skills to generate a modest economic activity for their and their familys benefit. Out of 76 participants at courses during 2009, currently about twenty mothers make up and sell their products, for modest profits. Some have formed a group to help each other and they define their most important gain as having formed friendships with each other. This positive experience stimulates us to offer the same possibility of experience to more rural communities. Also, as of this year, in every rural community a parents group has been formally constituted (Group of Family Representatives). Families have democratically chosen their representatives from the more active and involved mums and dads, whose role is precisely to stimulate families involved and the rest of the community, according to an
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tional staff (especially those who directly guide families) to get involved, working together, in a learning journey about themselves. Educating oneself to educate others. This, we have seen over the years, results in educators being more able to empathise with the needs and difficulties of the families being helped and therefore greater trust from these families. In practice, regular encounters are held (at intervals depending on the urban and rural zones), reserved for reading and reflection on texts concerning the main pillars of work with the families: education, charity and hospitality, marital relations, meaning of work, construction. During this personal voyage, a growing desire forms for technical and professional training fitted to the job to be done. Through time, at least in the urban area, almost all operators first completed compulsory education (which 85% of women involved had not finished), then they signed up for university, or university extensions courses relevant to their work. In the rural area, too, where all educators hired had minimum secondary education (bachillerato), 80% have completed or are taking university studies, generally using distance learning. Attention to the operator/family relationship As far as the relationship between the family and the operator is concerned, the most significant aspect is that it is single and stable over time as a reference point for education. We try to keep the same educational referee for more than a year, but often, especially lately, having differentiated activities according to age and type of involvement in the programme, at the beginning of the years activities (September in the urban zone and April in the rural one), the child has to change educator. The contact educator is responsible for work with the family as a whole. Apart from encounters with the contact educator, intervention can take place at various levels with the family. For example: study grants, health assistance, housing fitness, nurseries, afterschool, family vegetable gardens and animal husbandry. Decisions concerning additional intervention (timing and modality) are always taken by the contact educator, the group of educators for the area (pre-school, school and youth) in the urban area, or the group of educators for the geographic area in the rural zone, the area or zone coordinator and, depending on the activity, the people directly involved (e.g. the health promotion operator, for health cases). The more complex and difficult family cases are discussed in Monday morning meetings with the whole team of family educators, in the presence of area or zone supervisors or, depending upon the case, of programme coordinators. Case analysis discussion is a valuable opportunity of sharing work accomplished or to be done, as well as a way of lending objectivity to observations made, thus removing them from the potentially dangerous sphere of subjective interpretation. Should families change educator at the start of the new year, the former educator informs them of this before the summer holidays. In the urban zone we have noticed that families normally resist this change of educator, but then accept it and trust the new educator. In reality there is a period (the month of September or longer, depending upon
how close the friendship was) when mothers maintain close contact with the former educators and see them in their free time and outside of the usual meetings. The former educator also takes care to maintain the relationship and gradually introduces the mother into a relationship with the new educator. In this process, it is very helpful if the educators are conscious and transmit this to the families that they are part of a common effort, with shared aims and criteria, together with people linked by friendship, etc Information is gathered and passed on from one educator to another using a collection system, with a dossier for each child (from this September in the urban zone, for each family), containing initial data and evaluations along the way. Until little over a year ago, especially in the urban zone, the level of information gathered using available instruments was fairly low and consequently during the passage from one educator to another much was communicated verbally and left to the educators free initiative. This year in consideration of the evaluation process under way, we have been able to improve information collected initially from the family and its registration during the educational process, concentrating on qualitative and human development information. This should help to facilitate personalisation of the educational work and the passage of information concerning the education process, from one educator to another. In the rural zone, over the years, an organised system of home visits has been perfected. For each home visit, educators coordinate together the best modality, choosing from: visit from the contact educator only, visit from the area coordinator alone or accompanied by
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the educator, visit from two educators who both have contact with the family (e.g. a preschool and an after-school one). These visits have proved to be an important resource for getting to know people and for being known. Educators note how regular visits to each family make a substantial difference to the relationship, as they allow educators to enter the family on a more personal level and to better understand relationships. At the same time, parents and children fully welcome this visit, feeling that they are appreciated and understood in the very place where those socio-affective and cultural dynamics originate that then support the entire educational effort. Activating key resources in the territory Both in rural and urban areas, a very important aspect of AVSIs work is their collaboration with the local Church. In the urban zone, this is the local Parish Church, where there is an Italian congregation called the Piccole Apostole della Scuola Cristiana. For 4 years, AVSI has been running after-school activities with this Church, sharing costs and coordination of activities. Another important collaboration is that with the Congregation of the Sisters of the Sagrado Costado, particularly for immediate intervention in emergency needs of the family, as for example, food. This Congregation also runs a health centre with which AVSI is associated and a professional training centre with which we have worked in recent years on relevant projects. Both congregations serve the Parish. Our programme encourages children and parents to take part in parish activities that share the objectives and criteria of our activities. The parish priest, for example, has taken part in some activities with parents, has led some special liturgical occasions for parents in our programme (e.g. the via crucis). We are careful to pass on to families information concerning parish life and many of AVSIs employees are directly involved in it. The same happens in the rural area. Here our local counterpart, who expresses the pastoral activity of the diocese, has implemented very close collaboration with those parishes where the programme is active. The educators work is defined as Pastoral-educational and the local parish priests know and take part in programme events. The two nurseries currently run by the Programme are both parochial, under a convention signed with the government Education Authority. This convention allows the parish priest to take active part in selecting the educator and her assistant, in management decisions and in training meetings with parents. Operators in rural zones are generally selected with the collaboration of local priests, who suggest some active or noteworthy people in the community. This does not prevent Protestant families from having access to the programme. The three parishes offer accommodation for the programmes offices. The Ecuadorian Episcopal Conference itself has supported the programme in the rural zone with two computer workshops, a dressmaking workshop and a natural science laboratory with equipment, instruments and teaching material for studying biology, chemistry and physics at primary and secondary levels.
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Also, in the area of rural education, there is close collaboration with directors of the two Rural Schools Networks, covering about 35 schools, with whom training events and round tables have been organised, open to all teachers in our zones of activity. It should be mentioned that, when our programme began in the rural zone, as far as contacts with educational institutions were concerned, we found that parents had a totally passive and submissive attitude regarding all educational decisions. The families were therefore assisted in their family-school relations, thanks also to the relationship of the programme with these institutions. The constant risk here is that parents prefer to delegate the programme to resolve conflicts with the schools. It is actually very difficult to change this attitude of inbuilt fear of government authorities, especially in the more depressed and isolated rural zones. The programme therefore takes great care to follow and support all parental initiatives without taking their place. We have seen, in the rural area, that participation in the programme has really developed this sense of protagonism: e.g. organised groups of parents have presented official requests to the Province for reopening or expanding rural schools, with positive response from the authorities. Among other things, this shows increased awareness of the importance of children finishing their compulsory education and therefore being able to continue their studies. In the urban zone, on the other hand, the school situation is rather more complex, due to overall problems in institutions accepting childrens requests for attendance and a consequent territorial dispersion of primary school children. We have chosen in recent years to concentrate on a personal and direct relationship between family and institution, giving parents better knowledge of the educational system they are dealing with, as well as of how to follow their childs educational and didactical development. Following problems noted over the years in children attending after-school activities, last year we decided that the after-school session with educators was not obligatory, but an alternative for families that, because of work or other problems, could not directly help their children with school homework. The choice was given to other mothers who wanted to help their children personally with homework of a new type of afternoon meeting, with the children and their homework books, in order to guide and support mothers in this educational task. In the area of health, in the rural zone, collaboration with public health centres continues to grow. Collaboration takes place on a logistic level in organising training sessions for mothers on prevention and health promotion and in coordinating a medical check-up of children at least every quarter. Doctors also go to visit elderly patients or adults who cannot travel, on the basis of information from AVSIs health operators. Our intention is to work on developing this network and to get operative responses to questions taken up by the programme, e.g. the need for vaccination campaigns and free medicine promised by the government but not yet, or not yet evenly distributed among health centres. Collaboration with local authorities in urban and rural zones is carried out as needed. For example: in the rural zone the local authority donated the land on
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which a school support centre with 6 classrooms currently functions, it offered us use of the assembly room when the programme could not yet accommodate all parents in the community, it gave us free use of two mechanical diggers to shift and level earth for the sports field under construction. Particularly In the urban zone, other institutions that AVSI has collaborated with were other churches, when the family belonged to one, (e.g. Protestant churches) or special institutions in cases of emergency (childrens homes or juvenile court) or necessity (primary school, to find a place, as they are very scarce here). Also, in the urban zone, many families are involved in football clubs or neighbourhood committees, as well as dance clubs (in the latter case, about 7%). In these cases, the participation of such families in AVSI activities was certainly a great encouragement for them to try themselves in this type of activity and a benefit for other families on the programme. Such families set an example and encourage others.
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followed by secondary schools and recently support for Roma youth attending University). In Arad, Fundatia and AVSI began their presence in 1999, at first taking action in a situation of abandonment of very young children and babies: 0-3 years old. The operation in the city of Arad then continued, with activities for families at risk; this involved professional training for unemployed adults and getting them started in jobs. In fact, in the last few years, beginning from the changes of the local reality, also due to Romania recently becoming part of the European Union, and considering that the beneficiaries met some time previously had grown and have different needs compared to a few years ago, it was decided to favour the work orientation and professional training sector. In 2007, the first project started at the national level, financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which started up job training activities in all four zones of the country, where FDP is present: Bucharest, Cojasca, Arad and Cluj. Today, Fundatia Dezvoltarea Popoarelor is an authorised supplier according to Romanian law in the field of education and professional placement. Starting from 2008, it began structuring itself to access European Social Funds, presenting a number of financing proposals with national and international partnerships to develop services in the sector of school drop-out prevention, job placement and development of social economy. The Cojasca, Arad and Cluj work points were recently given autonomous legal status, becoming actual branches of Fundatia (respectively: FDP Dambovita branch, FDP Arad branch and FDP Cluj branch).
3.1. Introduction
The AVSI foundation presence in Romania is particularly connected to the problem of infantile AIDS. It started in 1994, after obtaining authorisation from the Romanian government to rehabilitate and expand the paediatric pavilion of the Dr Victor Babes infectious diseases hospital in Bucharest, which at the time was home to about 60 HIV-positive children. In 1996, AVSI encouraged the establishment of a local organisation, and the activity of Fundatia Dezvoltarea Popoarelor (FDP) started up; this no-profit government organisation endors the AVSI method (the 5 points of the method) and is the privileged local partner for AVSI actions. FDP immediately initiated distance support projects in Cluj for children in special schools and institutionalised children. 1998 marked the start of the social and educational projects in Bucharest for HIV-positive children, both abandoned and in the family. In the same year, following the meeting with some families that periodically brought their HIV-positive children to the Victor Babes hospital for care and treatment, an operation started up to support special needs children (AIDS and disabled) in the Roma village of Iazu, municipality of Cojasca (a village about 45 km from Bucharest, in the Dambovita region). After this, several projects to support education were created (starting from preschool, then primary and middle school,
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Right from the start of our experience we tried to support the family. A big job was to look for families who had abandoned their children (e.g. institutionalised HIV-positive children), to try and re-place the children with their natural families. This work has never stopped, although it has not had great results. Even now, for the HIV+ youth we have accepted into our shelter homes, we favour the possibility of retaining that relationship, even the smallest with their original families, attempting to valorise the possible and even the impossible. When we werent able to reintegrate the minors in their families we looked for different solutions: this led to the experiences of the shelter homes with substitute families (that accommodated a total of 21 children) and foster families (that accommodated a total of 7 children). In particular in the city of Arad, we also worked with families in difficulty, at risk, with targeted actions to prevent abandonment. We were therefore able to conclude that targeted actions to prevent abandonment are very important. Often a family abandons their child because the family is alone and does not realise how important the parents are for the childs development. We saw how educational accompaniment and a small material support (sometimes not even necessary) can have a great impact. We realised that to support the family, it is essential to also initiate orientation, work placement and professional training projects. So new activities were initiated to
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respond to this need. Now, Fundatia develops a series of work support activities in four regions in Romania, also thanks to projects funded by the European Social Funds. As regards the educational projects, in particular in the experience of Cojasca (Dambovita region), from the outset the parents were involved in the educational activities of their children: they participate in school field trips, celebrations (e.g. childrens birthday parties), work groups so they can play key roles in change and not just be passive subjects.
3.2. Context In the country villages in particular, there are problems such as: poverty, alco-
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holism, domestic violence, uneducated parents, often illiteracy, together with the lack of a steady job. It is hard to keep a job, especially in the rural areas where seasonal jobs are more frequent. This can be observed both in the Roma communities (for example in Cojasca), and in the other communities, such as the country ones of Jucu (in the Cluj region) and in the Arad region. It is also hard to keep a steady job due to the low level of professional qualifications. Many families only have government subsidies as a stable income (about 20 euro a month for each child) One particular phenomenon, unfortunately common in all eastern European countries, is child abandonment. There are many reasons for this, for example poverty is one, but the main reason is a question of mindset, because it was considered (and is still a common mindset now) that the government can look after a child better than a poor family. Families that abandon their children are often disorganised; in some cases women are alone, with social problems that include no job, no home, health problems (including psychological illness) or sometimes parents in prison Other causes are now joining these, lets say historical reasons, due to recent migration phenomenon. It is estimated that there are about 350,000 white orphans in Romania at this moment. Many of them are given to grandparents, older brothers and sisters, distant relatives or neighbours by parents who have gone to other European countries looking for work. Basically this new phenomenon concerns 7% of the infantile population To handle this emergency, in the last decade, the national child protection authority (a kind of ministry of children) proposed some emergency measures to close large institutions (note that in the nineties, about 100,000 children were abandoned in a population of about 22.5 million inhabitants). One of these was the establishment of a special figure maternal assistant, i.e. a person who decides to become parent by profession. To this, a person does a training course to obtain a professional certificate as maternal assistant, and with this, on the basis of a contract that involves a fair sum of money, the person can accommodate one or more abandoned children. Unfortunately however, very often the economic interests predominated behind this choice and it did not hold up over time: in fact, we saw that fami-
lies with this kind of motivation, or that were not suitably accompanied by local social services during the accommodation experience, often gave up the children taken in after a while (hence causing further trauma to the minors). Other reforms concerned the restructuring of mammoth spaces: many institutions (some accommodated hundreds of children in rooms of just 20-30) were dismembered and organised into smaller modular spaces: this enabled the social services to begin talking about accommodation homes and no longer about institution (as a result, apparently we can say the children were slightly less institutionalised but in actual fact, the only real difference to the childrens situation was material). In the past few years, these reforms halved the number of abandoned children (now estimated as about 45,000 minors), enabling Romania to reach an important target, necessary for its integration into Europe. Regarding this, another important reform ordered by the EU related to adoptions: to encourage national adoptions, and put a stop to what was considered real child trafficking, it was opted to go for a drastic solution and prohibit international adoptions. This prohibition was supposed to be temporary, until legislation that could clearly protect the interests of minors could be put into place but unfortunately we are still waiting for that: Romania is still a country where international adoption is not possible, despite the trends of thousands of children living in institutes A high percentage of Roma children do not attend school: for economic difficulties, parents lack of education or because of social marginalisation. Marginalisation is more frequent in city areas because having Roma students is a risk for many schools that could therefore be called school for gypsies for that reason. When a school is stigmatised with that name, very often the parents of non-Roma children ask to move their children to other schools in the same city It is not known exactly how many Roma children drop out of school, compared to other children, because there are no certain, official figures (and often, the Roma people try to hide their ethnic background). Still, it is estimated that attendance at preschool (for the Roma 17%) is about four times lower than the national average, and about 17% of Roma children do not attend any type of school The lack of consistency of the education system, marked in recent years by numerous functional changes caused by repeated reforms to the teaching system. This aspect leads to teachers losing motivation, made even worse by the low financial incentives Lack of concern for the health of their children, generated on the one hand by lack of education of parents and poor financial resources and on the other by the crisis in the health system. Many doctors and nurses look for jobs in European countries; this migration phenomenon of the healthcare labour force has in some cases caused the closure of hospitals due to lack of medical and paramedical staff One problem that is often ignored, with very meagre figures, is abortion, but it is estimated that Romania is one of the countries with the highest rate of pregnancy terminations in the world.
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3.3. Projects and numbers of families supported

The projects that Fundatia Dezvoltarea Popoarelor has, some in partnership with AVSI, are at the moment: Distance support (in Cojasca, Arad and Cluj). With long distance support we support 197 children with their families in Arad, both in the city (119) and country (78) areas. In Cojasca about 400 children, all in the country area. In Cluj, 123 both in country villages and in the city. The main purpose of the project is to prevent school drop out, with educational, socialising and training activities for teachers and parents. A project financed by MAE that terminates in November 2010 (in Cojasca, Arad, Cluj and Bucharest). With the MAE project, right now we support: 200 people in Arad, 220 people in Cojasca, 70 in Cluj, about 200 in Bucharest. The purpose of the project is to offer people suffering from hardship orientation, placement, mediation and professional training services. The project is coming to an end but its activities will continue and will expand thanks to the new strategic project on work An integrated project for HIV-positive minors (in Bucharest).
One regional training project in the automobile field (professional training for elec-
As well as four European Social Fund projects:
tricians, panel beaters and repair and maintenance workers), in partnership with AUTOITALIA and other companies in the automobile industry (FDP Bucharest); A strategic work project (in various regions in the country) aiming to attract and keep in the labor market the inactive people seeking work, or the unemployed people in five regions in Romania (including the four zones where FDP operates plus one new region with another local partner); A strategic educational project, with the aim of preventing school drop out in four zones in Romania (three where FDP operates Bucharest, Cluj, Dambovita) + the region of Galati (in association with another local partner). The FDP branch in Arad is not involved in this project; A strategic project in the social economy area with the goal of facilitating access of 240 people exposed to the risk of social exclusion on the job market in four regions in Romania, promoting the development of new social economy models and an inclusive society (FDP Bucharest + all three FDP branches).
At the moment only three still live in a family shelter (Casa Edimar) while the other youths have begun a path to independence that in the last two years has led to the closure of two out of the three shelters. Some of the 18 youths who left the shelters are truly independent while for others, their path towards independence is not easy: the young people are still having problems socialising, communicating and interacting with others, problems fitting into a job, problems managing their time and their expenses. In fact, we believe that we still need to offer these young people support until they become responsible and capable of finding their meaning/path in life, together with permanent monitoring of their state of health. Two interesting aspects have become more obvious in the past few years: on the one hand, the existence of other realities (associations and not only) that were involved in work, on the other hand the discovery of what we can call a new capacity for fraternal relationship between the young people themselves. Other associations: A community of Spanish Carmelite nuns that runs a community for poor girls in Bucharest who want to attend University, is also involved in accommodating one of our girls who lived in their community for a few months The Papa Giovanni XXIII community in Bucharest (ecclesiastic movement founded by don Benzi in Italy), has taken in one of our HIV-positive youths In the last three years, four young volunteers, one male and three females, lived for some periods in apartments with the youths A significant group of volunteers (about a dozen) spend their free time (games, sports etc) with some of the youths The don Orione congregation has recently been involved in setting up a work
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The two projects we will explore below in this document are: the integrated project for HIVpositive minors and the educational strategic project.
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3.4. First exploration: hiv-positive minors

In Bucharest we still support 21 HIV-positive minors who were abandoned years ago by their families; after checking (in 1998-199) a possible return to their families of origin, we accommodated them in three family shelters (in 2000 Casa Emilia and Casa Joy, in 2001 Casa Edimar).
laboratory about to start (thanks to another ESF project). The fraternal relationship capacity: This is a very interesting discovery in the most recent period. These youths have spent their entire lives together, first in an institute then in our shelter homes. Most of them have a strong relationship with each other. They phone each other and if they can they meet up every day, they lend each other money, they swap objects, and sometimes they cheat each other (selling each other things like mobile phones, computers, play station) or they tease each other. In some cases (now rarer) they have even had relationships with each other. The innovation of the latest period is that in certain moments of crisis, they are unexpectedly helped and supported, like in Angela (fictitious name)s case. Angela is one of our girls who had a baby in July. Right up to the moment she gave birth she needed very careful support and lived in an apartment with a Fundatia social worker. After the baby was born, Angela was supposed to move to a community for single mothers, run by an orthodox priest. At the time she was supposed to enter the community, the babys father, who still hasnt legally recognised the baby, insisted that they live together and did everything possible to prevent Angela from leaving Bucharest (the community is about a 3-hour drive from Bucharest), so after being in the community for one day only, Angela (together with her baby) ran away without telling us where she was going. Angela was first accommodated in the apartment where four of the most independent youths live, then she moved to another apartment where two of the quite independent girls live. She lived there until her boyfriend, who in the meantime had gone to Italy for work, returned to Bucharest and rented a small apartment where he lives with Angela and their baby. All of this happened independently of us: the youths worked together to support themselves and look after each other.
Teamwork Two separate teams are involved in working with the youths (for the different areas of action): The first team (responsible for the individual educational plans for each youth) mainly handles accommodation, education, recreational activity, free time, relations with families of origin and healthcare. A coordinator, an educator, all the volunteers involved in different ways The second team handles social inclusion activities (for the HIV-positive youths and also for other disabled youths): developing independent life skills, orientation, mediation and work placement, start up in protected work areas. A coordinator, a psychologist, a tutor, an educator and very shortly a social entrepreneur Another two Fundatia operators join the above teams and are involved in the training work performed with young HIV-positive youths with the course The value of life. The whole team meets every week to manage urgent situations (that by the nature of the project are frequent), to plan activities, verify the work performed the week before and, in turn, monitor the trend of the individual plan established for (and with) each youth. Periodically, the Fundatia operations manager also participates in the meetings. Problems From the youths point of view: lack of faith (and perhaps of love) in themselves: the path towards normality is very hard and we know it wont be possible for everyone. The youths see themselves in the role of the ill/disabled person who needs assistance. This leads to some resistance to the educational path undertaken with them in the last few years, as well as difficulty in projecting themselves into the future and, in particular imagining themselves constructing a family. From the operators point of view, even though they are often technically qualified there is a lack of educational relations. The educator, intended as the person who plays the personal relationship with the youth, so an enthusiastic, responsible adult who can show the way, is a rarity in Romania (suffice to think that there is no such thing as a professional educator, who is replaced by the social worker). Even amongst our operators there is a prevailing temptation to provide assistance rather than risk a relationship, to the point where they are blocked by a difficulty and are incapable of giving an opinion (one of the most manifest cases happened with Angela when she wanted to terminate her pregnancy: although all the operators were against abortion, they were incapable of opposing this fact). It is hard to judge some particular issues such as sentimental and sexual areas. From this point of view, the course The value of Life (which we ran with the FDP operators) and its recent accreditation (the course was recognised as a specialisation course for teachers and social workers from the Ministry of Education) is for everyone, and in particular for the people disseminating the course, a great cultural opportunity.
Accommodation of youths in casa Edimar Psychological and social support (counselling sessions with the youths, training
The project activities
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Valorisation of family relations with their families of origin (for example, some Support and accompaniment during maternity and support for new family units Healthcare support (frequent contacts with hospital treating the youths, moni Educational support (for the few youths who still go to school) and developing the
toring antiretroviral drug therapies) and dietary and hygiene education capacity for independent living (start towards independence, use of money, of time) world of work. of the youths spend the festive season or holidays with their families)
session on the theme of the value of life, home visits to the youths homes)
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Information, orientation and mediation for professional integration Start of protected work laboratories for youths who arent able to fit into the
3.5. Second exploration: preventing school drop out

Through the multi-regional partnership for the prevention of school drop out educational project, financed by the European Social Fund and continuing the educational action begun in Cojasca about 10 years ago, we proposed supporting about 1200 children and their families from four regions in Romania, to prevent them from dropping out of school. The project took place in partnership with three public authorities (the school inspectors in the regions of Dambovita and Cluj, the social work and child protection department of district 3 in Bucharest) and with other associations: the Dambovita and Cluj branches of Fundatia, the Romanian NGO, Childs heart in the Galati region, the Lithuanian NGO, Sotas, and CDO Opere Sociali, Italy. The operation takes place in 20 schools, in four regions in Romania, both in city and country areas, where drop out rates, particularly in the Roma communities, are very high. The project goals are to keep at least 840 primary and middle school students in the education system, to develop regional, multiregional and trans-national partnerships between institutions and organisations who play a part in executing school drop out prevention programmes and to develop a school after school programme in eight centres.
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The problems of the families and the children included in the project The Roma ethnic background of the families: 70% of the families involved in the project belong to the Roma minority. Most of them are part of the bear trainer line, with the following divisions: musicians, peddlers, jewellers, as well as brickmakers, for example in the community of Cojasca (for us an historical community of action). They respect the family and marriage tradition and 50% of them dress in traditional clothes, particularly the ones who live on the outskirts of Bucharest. Type of family/marriage statute: 80% of the childrens parents are not legally married and live together, some are single-parent families. Most of the women were underage when they were married according to the Roma tradition (often not legally). The mothers are responsible for bringing up and educating the children. Financial situation: 90% of the women are homemakers or have seasonal/occasional jobs: sales, collecting used iron/plastic, cleaning buildings. About 90% of the men have no regular, contracted job, they often work in the building sector or have casual farm jobs. The pro capita income ranges from the minimum (about 108 euro net salary per month) to the medium (about 315 euro net salary per month) of the economy, fluctuating from one month to the next, considering the high frequency of seasonal jobs in the farming sector. A constant income for families is what comes from the government child subsidiaries and from the social support grants from the school for students from economically disadvantaged families. The conditions of the home: 70% if the beneficiaries live in homes/apartments with the extended family, in 1-2 rooms at the most, furnished with rundown furniture. 50% do not have their own home, they often live in government housing, in an advanced state of deterioration, paying the council a moderate amount below the market price (in the city areas), or they live in terracotta and mud houses (in the country areas). An average of five people live together in one room: parents and children. Under these conditions, there is not enough room to be able to do homework. The family level of education: about 50% of the parents finished middle school, particularly the ones who live in the city area, while about 50% of them have never been enrolled at school and do not know how to read or write. So the parents cannot help the children with their homework, because they lack the knowledge, they have a poor vocabulary, the find it hard to understand texts/messages, particularly in the case of people who only speak the Roma language in the family (this is about 40% of the people selected in this project). The parents have a low level of education: most of them dropped out of school due to the familys financial straits, their frequent failing in one or all subjects or because their parents wanted them to. School problems for students who risk dropping out of school: all the students have poor results at school, generated by the lack of knowledge, by the learning difficulties, by the high absence rate and fluctuating attendance at lessons. Many of them do not even speak the Romanian language correctly so they have to face real
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difficulties in understanding the schools messages and requests. Once the children grow, in both the city and the country areas, we can see an increase in the school drop out phenomenon amongst middle school students who have to deal with the challenge of repeatedly failing one or more subjects. This is also due to the involvement of children in household chores: the young people do casual work (collect used iron, unqualified jobs in the building industry in the city, and farm jobs in the country). Most of the girls, usually after they turn 12, are involved in household chores particularly helping to raise their younger brothers and sisters. Both male and female children often did not attend preschool and this had a negative impact on their adaptation and future path at school. Parents relationship with the school: about 80% of the parents are not interested in school and often there is no communication with teachers at all. Some of the parents encourage their children not to attend classes. The teachers cannot work with the parents because the parents do not go to the school and very rarely participate in class meetings. Furthermore, the precarious material situation of many families poses another problem for keeping the children in school, which worsens during the school years when more is requested. In the zones where we have operated for many years with our educational projects, like the Cojasca community, parental involvement in their childrens education has improved a great deal.
prepared presenting all the experiences visited in Italy and Lithuania as well as an analysis of the possibility of applying these in Romania Develop and provide SDS activities. Creation of an SDS programme model (formulated by the multi-regional network that involves experts from every project partner and adapted at the district level, taking into account the specific needs of the target group and the resources available at the local level); start up of eight centres where the SDS programmes will be implemented (including restructuring and fitting out of spaces) Staff training. Training seminars for experts of the multiregional network, in order to create, develop and assess the SDS programme model; interactive workshops for teachers that approach the school-parents-community educational relationship (work on educational risk is proposed). Trainer instruction to continue the course on educational risk (the possibility of accrediting the training course will be assessed). Training for team staff on scholastic orientation. Teamwork At the local level, each team is trained by a coordinator, two counsellors (generally psychologists), an educational psychologist, a social worker. Weekly team meetings are coordinated by the project manager amongst the four local coordinators for verification and subsequent programming of activities. Again weekly, at the local level the whole multidisciplinary team meets and periodically cross-theboard meetings are organised to involve the same professional figures of the four teams (for example all the counsellors meet) to discuss common issues. Particular problems As far as teachers and principals are concerned, particularly in the city area, we can see a lack of esteem and faith in the possibility of a positive change for disadvantaged students, Roma students in particular. The team is a bit under-qualified to work with these new types of traditionalist Roma groups, far different from the Roma people that Fundatia has traditionally worked with (for example, we think of the problem of the Romanian language). The families, also provoked by the not always positive comments of the teachers, expect tangible assistance that, apart from the social scholarships, is not part of the project and for this reason they are often disinclined to meet operators.
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The main project activities: Preparation of a study of the causes leading to the risk of dropping out of school Activities aimed at increasing the degree of student and parent awareness of the importance of the school, through: quarterly home visits, to the home of the selected students, to inform them of the importance of education. Caravane (travelling events to promote awareness in villages) of the companies of students at risk of dropping out of primary school. According to the principle of peer-to-peer education, the school students will visit their companions who have problems of high absenteeism from school twice a year; giving incentives to attend school (180 quarterly social scholarships will be given to students with serious material difficulties). Visits for educational purposes: as compensation for good attendance and good school results of 375 students a year, visits outside the community will be carried out annually (theatre, museums, films). Counselling of students who risk dropping out of school and their parents. Counselling of parents, individual and group: with the goal of understanding the problems of the family, to improve the relationship with their child and to understand the role of the family in their childrens education. Individual or group counselling for children will be done quarterly, in order to minimise the risk factors, school failure or psychological discouragement Exchange of good practices in Italy and Lithuania. The purpose of the visits is to understand and learn from the experience of trans-national partners within programmes like School after school (SDS) Preparation of a good practices guide within programmes like SDS. A guide will be
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3.6. Common work method

The work with the projects funded by the European Social Fund has forced us to equip ourselves more precisely with work tools such as: Clear definition of the indicators during the planning stage. Numerical indicators (e.g. no. of young people placed in jobs); quality indicators (improvement in school performance); gender indicators (% women/girls); site indicators (for example city
Planning of the activity (top to bottom). Every month, the project manager prepares
or country) and time indicators
an activity programming document to be sent to each coordinator who in turn prepares their own monthly planning documents for the activities, sent to the members of the team who in turn schedule these Monthly reporting (top to bottom). Monthly, each team member prepares a report that is sent to the coordinator who sends it to the manager who prepares the final report Selecting beneficiaries. It is necessary to set the criteria and a selection method that is transparent, objectively verifiable and obviously suitable for the project purposes. A good selection is fundamental to achieve the goals provided by the project. First of all, the whole target group must be clear (young, disabled, women, level of education, children at risk etc). Once the selection procedure is applied, a placement list is drafted and the results are communicated. The selected beneficiaries are registered according to a precise registration formula common to all FSE projects Registration of each beneficiary. Each beneficiary fills in a form that contains their personal, social and family details etc. (n.b. the NGO staff must ask for special accreditation to be able to use this personal data) Targeted tools will then be formulated to suit the activities. For example, for home visits, there are social investigation forms filled in by the social worker and periodically updated; the educational psychologist monitors school attendance and school performance for the school; the team has a global observation tool (which indicates the remaining capacities of the person) of the beneficiary for the social inclusion activities and this has lead to the next tool: the individualised educational project.
4
Reflections upon the experience
Family
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4.1. The reliability of family ties
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by Eugenia Scabini AVSI project experiences always bring us extreme situations with children and families who in various ways have been affected by negative events or who have grown up in unfavourable situations or great hardship. Extreme situations are dramatic but they have the huge advantage of forcing us to go to the root of the questions, because otherwise it would be impossible to bear the challenge of doing a job that is a drop in the ocean of needs of people and of children in particular. The question that immediately springs to mind is: how can I help them through the kind of work I do? What prevents growth and what helps growth? We can even put it in another way: what, in the life of people, constitutes a resource and what an obstacle? What is a resource? There are many possible answers: if you have lots of opportunities, have more money, are healthy or better off But let us cut right to the quick: what is the goodness of assets? What makes the difference in life? The goodness of assets is the relation, what makes the difference in life is growing in a context nourished with good links, with significant relationships or not. This is the human capital that produces development. When we say that relations are a resource we do not mean to refer to something that one possesses as if it were a rucksack to put on our back. It is more something that connects, that links us to each other. Why is relationship the good of all goods? Because of the fundamental fact that man does not grow on his own, he is generated and his identity has to do with the fact that he is generated. He is generated at the start of his life when he is born, but he is generated also from later relations. You dont grow if you are not in a generative context, if you are not inserted into significant relations that nourish you with their presence. However, the dramatic side to this statement must be explained immediately. While good relationships cause growth, bad relationships are a huge obstacle to growth. The fundamental relationships can produce well-being but also dis-ease. I say fundamental relationships because, while it is true that all relationships are potentially a resource or an obstacle, this is above all true for primary relationships like family ones. The family is in fact the place par excellence where relationships are nourished, for humanisation. When its relationships, instead of being constructive become destructive, growth is seriously jeopardised. Family relations are therefore crucial both in a good and bad sense. The situation is not black and white with positive relations on the one hand and all negative on the other. The goodness of the relation, its representing a resource is always accompanied by the risk of it being a hindrance, relating badly, invading or
abandoning, of seducing instead of promoting. But the contrary is also true, even in the most negative situations it is always possible to make a positive core emerge. Therefore to return to our initial question, we could rephrase it like this: what characteristics of the relationship turn it into a resource? I can summarise them in a single word: reliability. The word reliability rotates around the word trust. When a relation provides trust and hope, it is a generative rapport that causes growth. Trust/hope is a good expression of the affective aspect of the relation, that of benevolent opening, of amazement for a gift, of free giving. This is a typical maternal symbolic element: we can link it to the maternal function of giving life and warmth to the child, and of infusing him with hope during his life. But there is also another aspect to trust. We in fact say of a person that they are both trusting, and trustworthy. Trust, which starts as a free movement immediately embraces an ethical aspect, that of commitment. We in fact say to deserve trust or on the contrary to betray trust. The other person must in some way fulfil the trust we have in him and those who are trusted must express this in deeds, concrete actions that prove it (for example the violence on women highlighted in the reports are an attack on the ethical aspects of the relation). The human relationship is therefore fuelled by affective and ethical aspects, free actions and respect, giving and obligation, authoritativeness and justice, welcome and pushing forward to self-realisation. This second ethical aspect, is symbolically paternal. When we say maternal or paternal it does not necessarily mean that it is of the mother or the father, but we refer to the functions: the affective and ethical function cannot be separated, in other words both parents (fathers and mothers) are responsible even if the mother is more sensitive to issues of affection and acceptance and the father to issues linked to the commitment of responsibility/urge to self-realisation, towards self-fulfilment. Today, both in the projects described and in our society, it is evident that there is a diffusion of maternage of a very emotional affection and little of the paternal role that is more an assumption of responsibility, in the sense of pushing forwards. In our society the paternal function is very much in crisis, the one that also has the ethical function, indicating what is good and what is bad. In the West therefore the issue leans heavily towards the maternal aspect. It is therefore absolutely essential to recuperate the paternal aspect. We say that religion may also play a part in this. We must not forget that religion, religo is the fundamental form of relationship. Our religion emphasises the paternal figure; perhaps those societies that have indirectly or directly lost their sense of religion, contribute to unlinking maternal from paternal. Maternal and paternal care can be expressed in various ways in different cultures and in different traditions. Whatever the context, family care is never just the father and the mother. Siblings often represent a great resource (one which in western culture, unlike those described in the practices, is running out due to a lack of raw material!) but above all there are the families of origin of the mother and of the father. The family is always psychologically extended, it goes back to past generations and
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http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_02021994_families_it.html
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also includes those no longer alive, who are however a symbolically significant presence. We must reread those passages from the Letter to Families by John Paul II where he speaks of the genealogy of the person (number 9)7. We are each our own person as the child of a father and a mother and we have our own place in our family history. We must not forget this second part of the sentence. When we deal with children with difficult negative family histories it is important to try and see if there is someone in the maternal and paternal genealogy that has been important, positive, that represents a light, a beacon, that redeems the family, allowing positive identification . In the moving search by AVSI projects to salvage that piece of even the most broken down family (because children always need to save their family) we must also consider this far-reaching long-term perspective of the various generations. We talk of resilience, namely of the enhancement of the familys capacity to face the problems. I would like to highlight that in this enhancement of the positive we must not be afraid of drama. Drama must not be negated, it is part of life. Looking at the positive does not mean closing your eyes to the dramatic aspect. The family is, on the contrary, a dramatic place. It forces you to hold together the differences, this is family drama. It forces you to link differences - could there be any greater difference than the one between male and female? Link together a male and a female, link together different generations, that is when, faced with the difficulties of keeping differences together, it is easy for you to eliminate one of them. Reliable relationships are therefore the resource par excellence, relationships in other words that inspire trust and hope (affective aspect). They must be loyal and just, respectful of our dignity an that of others (ethical aspect). Growing a relationship that expresses both the maternal and paternal code, which embraces but does not restrain, preferring to urge the other person towards fulfilment. A relationship is generative if it allows differentiation, if it, in other words, offers a sense of belonging and at the same time uniqueness. Care for affective aspects without care for value, for what has value, for the meaning of the relationship, makes the relationship destructive. On the contrary, however, a relationship that neglects everything or that expects only rules and duties without an affective load is sterile. Where can a person capture this sense of relationship? In the significant relations that a person has and that are intimately linked to the story of the generations. Relationships gain reliability through concrete behaviour, it is enclosed in traditions, in the familys educational practices, in care received and given. Through what mothers and fathers and more generally, significant people say and do, this is the path for the affective and ethical symbolic nourishment that is the humus for human beings. Without a loving presence humans literally cannot survive. On this subject I like to remember one of the first cases quoted in all psychology manuals. Ren Spitz, a famous child neuropsychiatrist in the thirties carried out lengthy
studies into the cause of child marasmus, a disease characterised by gradual deterioration of the organs that led to the death of children in American orphanages. In the end, after careful observation, he came to the conclusion that what was missing in the white sterile silent surroundings of the nurseries was warm affectionate human contact that represented the stimulus for living and growing. Children who are starved of affection, even if well looked after, pass through various stages of ever deeper depression until they let themselves die. Extending this debate we can say that, yes, it is true, it is right and our duty to try and feed poor children, but together with food they must be able to count on reliable family relationships or in any case on reliable presences, who know how to care lovingly and authoritatively, who do not neglect, do not betray and know how to give direction and a sense of adventure for life. The reliability or non-reliability of these relationships is the symbolic heritage that comes from our family history: is it possible to trust or should I mistrust those close to me? Is it possible to be loyal, to have respect or does tyranny rule relations? Am I loved, do I have a role in the story that generated me or do I have to impose my existence desperately on the eyes of those around me? Robert Beavers (1986), backed by his long experience as a family therapist, observed how violent children come from unreliable family situations whereby neglect, violence, arbitrariness and a lack of loyalty in relations reigns supreme. I would like to stop for a moment and take a closer look at this aspect because it describes a situation that is very probably extremely familiar to those who work in this sector. This author observes that these families have an unstable organisation, the parents (if there are any) are present hardly ever, the children often grow up in the street and at times it is difficult to identify who exactly makes up the nucleus, because, both the parents and children come and go, run away from home, but then inevitably return as needy and hostile as before, after having gathered failures in the outside world (p. 124). Paradoxically, it is very difficult to help these families and these children who so badly need help, because they are diffident towards anyone who holds a role of authority, even professional, and fear relations as soon as these become close and intimate. In these cases it is as if a person has been generated but not recognised. While in fact the first word of the relation is being generated the second is being recognised. You dont know who you are if another person doesnt recognise you: this is the source of your self-esteem. Identity construction of everyone is supported by a sort of implicit unconscious interior dialogue with the significant others in our family history. A persons identity lies in recuperating their genealogy, in assuming their uniqueness/responsibility as a member of a story. There is a sort of negotiation between what we have received that is good and what has been an obstacle. Our lifes work consists in facing up to both good and bad and turning bad into good. But we cannot do this if we cannot count on beneficial presences. What are beneficial presences? They are the significant encounters with reliable people who can act as
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fathers and mothers. Even social workers can be beneficial presences who allow the necessary strength to be given for facing dramatic stories and, God willing, who allow hope to be recuperated in relationships in order to salvage something good, still within these contexts. The operator cannot pull back from this adventure, which is often not only painful but also tiring. The other person in fact may respond to your offer of help with aggression. Perhaps it is the only way he knows and for you it is not easy to be on the receiving end of this treatment. However from inside this path of reappropriation, you can understand the reason for this behaviour, you can manage to move beyond it, to forgive. Forgiving is not forgetting, it is being able to move on. You try again, you are able to try again despite the failure of the relationship, this is forgiveness. It is not negation, acting like nothing is wrong. The position of forgiveness (also towards our own lives) is to project the hope of relationship having faced failure. Thus a person can understand, not without pain and, (why not?), anger, that an absent or violent parent has in turn been little loved as a child, and through forgiveness, recuperate at least some threads of the relationship. Education is accompanying the other person on a journey of reappropriation, of comprehension (also of the problematic aspects) that come to us from our generational heritage. It is a hard journey, painful at times. The operator, in order to be an authoritative interlocutor, must himself face and elaborate his family history with his resources and his obstacles. Responding to the need is at the same time self-interrogation. Caring for others is caring for ourselves: through participation in the family stories of others we are called upon to work on ourselves. This is true for everyone but it takes on special meaning in the situations described in the AVSI projects, in which many educators come from difficult family histories and bear the signs. It is important always to remember that families may not make it, some families do not make it, we too might not make it. The most important thing is not making it or not, but not disappearing. We must help each other so that, even when we do not make it, we do not disappear. Therefore a family might not be able to cope with its children any more, but it must be able to tell them and others something about this. What is not tolerable and what undermines reliability is when a person disappears. You can tolerate someone who isnt making the grade and says so: I couldnt make it I wanted to, but I couldnt. This is not what turns drama into tragedy. The first thing to be done therefore is to recognise, show your face, not run from bad situations, not say it didnt happen, look reality in the face, even its shortcomings. As with the cases of family violence mentioned in the projects. The second thing is to put this drama inside a relationship. When the pain or the violence or anything that happened is put into a trustworthy relationship it can be looked at. In order not to
run from the bad things in our lives, we must put them inside a relationship, because it is the relationship that heals, that gives the possibility of a cure. Then there is total recovery and partial recovery, but the relationship heals, the trustworthy relationship can heal, can give this hope and the effect of this hope is to allow a relaunch of the relationship. It is necessary to give proof that there is nothing we cannot face, we do not need to run away, people have to help each other not to escape, to be sincere in saying when they cannot make it and ask for help. When a family disappears it is as if the relationship has betrayed you. So we need to go and look for it. The relationship does not betray if it declares its failure, as in the case of parents who divorce, the dramatic thing is when we throw down our bat, when the other isnt there, there is no form of presence and therefore the relationship is not saved. In this we need to help each other, all of us, in working to reappropriate our story. If the Lord gives us a long life we have more time for reappropriating our story, more chance of returning to the bright moments along its path, of forgiving and being forgiven. We dont always succeed, but it is important not to just close the door on it and when we are still in time to do so, we must retrace the journey. It is a difficult enterprise, but we must however set out, start. The start is always a step in the direction of grace. It will take generations for the worst wounds to heal over, but this does not frighten us, we take it into consideration. What is familiar lives for a long time and spreads down through the generations. Right now, we must immediately create strong fraternal relationships and those who have been luckier and able to count on family resources, those who know what it means to be loved in this way must support the less fortunate and know that effort and delusion will be involved without bowing out. It is important to point out that, as happens within the family, where each of us internalises, not only the rapport with our father and mother, but also their relationship, in the same way project educators and beneficiaries learn, gaining experience, not only from their rapport with social operators but from the rapport that exists between the social operators. We need to form a chain. Each link is important but the chain is what holds the links together. As an alternative, we can use the word thread instead of link and weft instead of chain. Each thread is important but all the threads worked together make the weft. A fraternal society is a weft and can give a beautiful pattern. When we weave it we draw on the fact that every mans heart is engraved with a desire for family, for good relationships, while affected by anything bad we suffer or do. Let us remember the oft-repeated expression The family becomes what you are. The family is an asset hidden in relations, at times betrayed by relations and which must be revealed. Everyone who helps in this work makes a valuable contribution to the construction of personal identity and the dignity of the person. When you work with the family even the symbolic aspects must be enhanced, the place is the home: families cannot live of ethereal things. When you speak of a
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place, you identify yourself with a home, places too have a memory, any of us gets attached to places. The places that symbolically represent a familiar aspect also permit rediscovery of the family, therefore it is not just an empty place, but a point of reference. In the projects described, the attempt to create beautiful places is highlighted, ones that express the attractiveness of the home, namely the desire for family. The home does not have to be rich, but it must be cared for, not empty. Relationships are expressed, they are not mute. Things that are neglected are proof of a relationship that does not work, this is why they must be looked after. Much social work is carried out generously, but we need to be careful because generosity without gratitude can be dangerous. The generous grateful person knows how to respond to another person, knows that what he is doing is because he has had, has received. It is very important for generosity to be accompanied by gratitude, at least by a thread of gratitude. You can even be extremely generous but attached to your generosity and this may become a form of narcissism, while generosity is good if it includes a hint of gratitude. The fundamental test for personal lives is the presence or not of gratitude. Previously we said that drama occurs when a negative experience leads to generalisation and we arrive at the conclusion that there is no more hope in another relationship. At this point the operator has to manage to relaunch the relationships, perhaps another relationship, salvaging something good that has happened in the persons history and being able to relaunch the relationship. This is basically what allows people to move forward. Helping people to regain trust in relationships is very important and this is why it generates hope. Hope (something projected into the future) is more than trust, more than justice. It is, in fact, a virtue, an ideal emotion. Hope is the virtue of trust and justice. It is what allows us to recuperate trust when it has been betrayed, it is what allows us to overcome injustice, to move on, to not fall into the mindset of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, to forgive and therefore manage to re-establish the order violated. The word pardon and reconciliation from this point of view are very important. You can forgive and reconcile yourself when you can also understand that a bad parent was in turn an unlucky child and this allows you in some way to reconcile yourself with the negative experiences. You however need a great experience of life and special grace to understand that those who hurt you do not totally personify the bad that they did, but also had an unlucky past. Therefore you can forgive this story and reconcile yourself. What has been said about reconciliation does not only occur in extreme situations, it happens in the lives of all of us, because we all need this possibility for reconciliation with what we have not managed to be, with our positive and negative experiences. For this reason, operators themselves need to live within significant relationships because nobody is self-sufficient, no-one! The fact that we are all sons and daughters reminds us of this: nobody is self-sufficient. There is not just the child, there is also the parent, the institution. A self-sufficient
institution is not attentive to the difference. The message that comes from the family tells you loud and clear that you have to be attentive to the difference, wife to husband and to their children. Being attentive to the difference is the relationship that does not cancel out the other persons diversity, but through caring for the other person, maintains the specificity. This is the most important duty in life: maintaining relationships by letting them go, letting them leave, not owning them, because generating entails growth and letting go. Generating also has this aspect of letting go, which is a very tiring aspect. When good relationships are created, they are already moving towards their realisation, something that is not us, something that goes beyond, something that pulls away from us. Bibliography Beavers R., Famiglie sane, intermedie e gravemente disfunzionali in Walsh F ., Stili di funzionamento famigliare, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 1986, orig. ed. 1982. Cigoli V., Scabini E., Relazione famigliare: la prospettiva psicologica, in Scabini E., Rossi G. (eds), Le parole della famiglia, Studi Interdisciplinari sulla famiglia n.21, Vita&Pensiero, Milan, 2008. Mc Adams D. P., de St. Aubin E., A theory of generativity and its assessment through selfreport, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, v. 62, 1992, p.1003-1015. Scabini E., Cigoli V., Il famigliare. Legami, simboli e transizioni, Raffaello Cortina, Milan, 2000.
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4.2. AVSI intervention with families within the framework of good practices by Giovanna Rossi
I have known the work that AVSI does and followed it for many years now and it seems to me that they have taken a particularly advantageous direction over the last ten years. Not only has their operational capacity increased, but the cultural dimension of their actions has gained strength. Reading the experiences described I was truly struck by this process, because it is evident that AVSI is managing to adequately report its experiences, their relevance and their capacity to be productive and reproductive also on an international level. The first observation regards what we could call family deprivation. AVSI almost always works in situations where there is great family deprivation, in other words there is a lack of family there are pieces of family. Almost all the projects in fact start from a meeting with the children, children with no families or with serious family difficulties. This also happens on the international scenario, not only in those contexts where AVSI is operative. This phenomenon can be interpreted in two different ways: One is emphasis on the family crisis, a sort of very widespread denigration, even in the media, of the family in our country and often on the front pages in the media. True lists are drawn up of the shortcomings and deficiencies in families The other is doing what the practices described have done. In other words starting over from what is positive, recuperating what is possible, saving what can be saved of the family. These are two culturally opposite perspectives, the first relativises the significance of the family and minimises the place that the family has in peoples lives. The second, on the contrary, consists in enhancing even what little remains of the family. I was very pleased to find this second perspective in the experiences described. The family emerges as a cultural universal that goes beyond its creation, as Lvi-Strauss teaches, we find it in all cultures. In other words, the family is a primary relation, at the base of society, going beyond its tangible creations in fact. The second observation regards consideration of the child. The path described by the projects goes from the child to the family: there is a fundamental difference between supporting the child, an idea of the child as isolated and almost to be saved from its family or the child as offspring. As you know, many NGOs that help children work from this starting point, attempting at most to recuperate the mother figures. Whereas in the experiences described the indispensability of the child-family link emerges. From the child to the family identifying three paths: 1) through maternal mediation 2) through paternal mediation 3) and through parent mediation. These paths can co-exist quite well, in many cases they are interwoven. I particu-
larly want to point out that this insistence on the idea of the family linked mainly to maternal mediation can do considerable harm. In other words, insisting on and testifying to the importance of the maternal link, which albeit important, without the paternal link, without the link with the parental network, can in the long run generate huge difficulties in the childrens growth. Over recent years, interesting studies have been carried out into the father figure8. After gender reflection of a feminist bent, now we are also talking about gender in relation to men, above all focusing the issue of the relation between the father and the child during the work carried out. Many studies have also highlighted that fathers find it very difficult to put their relationship with their children into practice, above all in situations of great mobility. Today we are seeing great mobility, not only linked to migration from developing countries but also within western contexts. Many families are forced to live apart and many fathers want to recuperate their relationship with their children. What is striking about these studies is that they talk of the father and the mother but there is no family. This on the contrary emerges with work by AVSI: the family is there. Recuperation of the father, or support for the mother figure may be dealt with while excluding the family. The family goes beyond the father and the mother, it is a relational experience that goes further, not a sum of individuals9. We must reflect on the family, put the family in the centre, in this way we can truly recuperate the father figure. The third observation refers to the importance of networks between families. The experiences described have shown that we must build with the families or with what remains of the family. This helps us to read the family as a whole and manage to build networks between families and the community10. This path is in part present in the projects described: where it exists, it is very important. It must be read from a process viewpoint. If we build with families, with the level of engagement featured in many of the experiences presented, we can build networks between families. On the contrary, if we see the family as nuclear and private we generate isolation and not a community dimension. Helping families to escape from isolation helps to meet needs, building network projects between families, in a perspective of mutual help. Put another way, families who help each other, mothers who help other mothers leads to the activation of secondary networks that are very important in solving problems. We therefore reach the third step of the process that consists in building the community, namely constructing settings for life where values and concrete life can be shared. Usually, we use the word community to talk about it in a territorial context. In reality, construction of the community is based on two elements, the shared sense (dimension of value) and the structure
Making Sense of Fatherhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011 Rossi G.,Temi emergenti di sociologia della famiglia. La rilevanza teorico-empirica della prospettiva relazionale, Vita e Pensiero, Milan,2003. 10 Scabini E., Rossi G. (edited by), Promuovere famiglia nella comunit, Studi interdisciplinari sulla famiglia, n.22, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2007.
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(who lives in a certain situation, with what characteristics, what are the existing networks). Another observation relates to the theme of cohesion. The experiences described create social cohesion: this is an issue that has been widely addressed on a European and international level. There are some very different viewpoints: social cohesion can be supported without creating communities, in other words substantially based on recuperation of individuals (e.g. unemployment, serious segregation) who are helped singly. It certainly creates a context with greater visibility, but this is not enough. The other vision is the collectivist vision, which features greatly in the debate on cohesion. What is missing? The family, again. Successful social cohesion projects are the ones that use family mediation, that make the most of the primary settings like the family, intervening through enhancement and creating, through them, the development of community character. Then there are intergenerational services. There are services, actions that we can call good practices, whereby the different generations are put to work together. It is an indication of a workshop style that may not only involve the father, but also grandparents and parents. Leveraging the exchanges between generations is very important. For example, there are interesting experiences of services whereby the grandparents teach not their own grandchildren, but also other children and adolescents help their grandparents. The father and mother are not always present. We need to have a slightly broader vision of the family and in this sense make the most not only of direct generations (grandparent and grandchild). A grandparent can be a grandparent to lots of grandchildren who are not directly his. Enhancing the dimension of intergenerational reciprocity that is a beneficial source is important in services and intervention. The fourth observation regards the AVSI work methodology: is AVSI a subsidiary organisation? The answer is yes, but with several caveats as was highlighted by what has been said, like for instance, Romania. To be more precise: is AVSI a subsidiary organisation for families? I would say yes as, from what I have heard and also from what I have read, I get the explicit idea of enhancement of the family, a desire to help it to become active and able to care for its members. The acquisition of autonomy does not mean breaking links but becoming autonomous while maintaining a relation. This is a crucial challenge above all for the younger experiences. Furthermore, is AVSI a subsidiary organisation in the contexts where it works? What relation does it establish with the other social actors, with the other organisations present in the context, does it implement synergies in a perspective of reciprocity? These questions are in part still open. The fifth observation is the issue of good practices11. Are the experiences described good practices? There is a crucial indicator for answering this question, linked to the word trust, often used in the cases. We can use the term good practice if it generates social capital seen
11
as strengthening of the network, an increase in trust, reciprocity and cooperative orientation. We can say that there is social capital if a form of relation exists that creates goods and services through exchanges that are neither monetary nor political nor client-centric nor pure gifts, but reciprocal social exchanges. To evaluate if it is a good practice or not, we must understand the relational quality of the exchange in a perspective of reciprocity. Social capital rests on a network of relations, its culture is trust, its modality of action is willingness to collaborate12. When we want to measure the level of social capital in intervention and services, we consider their network content, namely the network on which the action is based and, involving all the actors, those who promoted or received the action, we evaluate transformation of the trust aspects (increase, decrease). In the same way we then measure reciprocity, in other words if there have been instances of reciprocity and what importance they have had, with whom, etc. This goes both for those who promoted the action and also for those due parole in pi nel testo italiano benefitting from it. Finally, we must understand what level of collaboration the action entails. To completely answer the question as to whether they are good practices we must be able to tell if they are effective, if they are efficient, what the exchange rules are and what lifestyle the intervention aims at. Finally we must consider the ethical quality of the aims, something not normally included in evaluation of good practices. Very often we judge intervention and services to be good practices only from a point of view of efficiency and we do not consider the effectiveness (which is the capacity to meet needs) or even the social capital and, as a consequence, the ethical quality of the aims and the social capital must be interpreted in the different contexts, because we do not have the possibility of applying an identical set of indicators in all contexts. The method allowing us to answer this question may also vary greatly. In some cases we may need statistical data: the fact that a certain modality is used when registering intervention is very important for giving a sense to narration, etc. Finally a very important element is possible generalisation of the intervention carried out. It is fundamental to remember that if we put evaluation processes in place, like those explained here, we are able to put in place a capacity for reflection. Let us say that the final frontier for good practices is the fact of being able to have generated a capacity for reflection on what we have produced starting with all these indicators13. Social capacity therefore means also being able to bring about change, it means increasing the operators capacity for self-reflection, starting with the results of what he has attained. This is not just about the action carried out but also about self-analysis. At the moment, this way of seeing intervention is a modality that is little implemented, not very common, but extremely fascinating.
Rossi G.,La famiglia come capitale sociale, in Scabini E., Rossi G. (edited by), La ricchezza delle famiglie, Studi interdisciplinari sulla famiglia, n.24, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 201 13 Carr Mittini E.,Unosservazione che progetta. Strumenti per lanalisi e la progettazione relazionale di interventi nel sociale, LED, Milano, 2008; Rossi G.,Boccacin L., (edited by), Riflettere e agire relazionalmente, Maggioli Editore, Rimini 2011
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Rossi G., Boccacin L. (edited by), Capitale sociale e partnership tra pubblico, privato e terzo settore. Vol. I. Casi di buone pratiche nei servizi alla famiglia, Franco Angeli, Milan,2007.
Bibliography Carr Mittini E., Unosservazione che progetta. Strumenti per lanalisi e la progettazione relazionale di interventi nel sociale, LED, Milan, 2008; Rossi G.,Boccacin L., (edited by), Riflettere e agire relazionalmente, Maggioli Editore, Rimini 2011. Miller T., Making Sense of Fatherhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,2011. Rossi G.,Temi emergenti di sociologia della famiglia. La rilevanza teorico-empirica della prospettiva relazionale, Vita e Pensiero, Milan,2003). Rossi G., Boccacin L. (edited by), Capitale sociale e partnership tra pubblico, privato e terzo settore. Vol. I. Casi di buone pratiche nei servizi alla famiglia, FrancoAngeli, Milan,2007). Rossi G., La famiglia come capitale sociale, in Scabini E., Rossi G. (edited by), La ricchezza delle famiglie, Studi interdisciplinari sulla famiglia, n.24, Vita e Pensiero, Milan 2010 Scabini E., Rossi G. (edited by), Promuovere famiglia nella comunit, Studi interdisciplinari sulla famiglia, n.22, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2007
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Appendix
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5.1. Monitoring and evaluation of Family Friendly good practices
by Elisabetta Carr Glossary and common definitions Good practice Debate regarding good practices must develop from a need to rethink quality. Conceiving quality exclusively as the achievement of certain standard requisites could in fact lead to total underestimation of aspects that cannot be standardised as they are too closely linked to specific situations, while what makes a practice good cannot ultimately be traced back to generalisable elements. Every single situation has its own set of peculiar qualities that exist and can only exist there. Good practices put standard requisites in place through specific locationrelated interpretation, enriching them with original qualities that cannot be reproduced. This reminds us that we must never lose sight of the objectivity of personalisation, which calls for operator flexibility and also a capacity (and possibility) not to see professionalism as a cage limiting freedom of action (Folgheraiter 1998). Furthermore, establishing criteria to be used when defining projects as good practices for the allocation of funding introduces greater regularity and transparency in how intervention is planned, by both public parties and those in the non-profit sector, which are becoming accustomed to accurately describing their objectives, correctly measuring the strategies and resources available for achieving them. In addition to which, the recently introduced criteria of innovativeness and sustainability have, on the one hand, promoted a new creativeness in the social field and on the other the awareness that no project can survive solely with public funding, but must be proactive locally to generate new resources with which to pursue their activity. Based on these considerations, it would appear necessary (Donati 2007a) to elaborate a model of good practice that: Reconnects the goodness of the action with that of the welfare configuration within which it is promoted; Introduces as a distinctive criterion the increase in social capital and in the relationality of the intervention (Folgheraiter 2007a); Takes on an evaluation and not merely descriptive nature, possibly levelling practices relevant to the same problem. Overall, as Bramanti sustains (2007, p. 209) it is possible to confirm that we are seeing a good practice, with regard to services/intervention with the family, when, in a certain context a series of actions are put in place to address a complex, socially relevant need, (such as reconciling family and work; encouraging family engagement; intervention for minors in conditions of serious risk; support/help for caregivers to the elderly; ), promoted preferably by a group of partners, which may unfold to include, all the parties, providers and users, with special attention to the development of the families social capital. Welfare The subject of good practices first and foremost brings into play the nature
of the prime objective of every social policy: welfare, the guarantee of a well-being for all citizens. For many years we believed that this was essentially guaranteed by a dual order of factors: 1) the adequacy of each partys private resources (deriving from the familys economic resources, relational and informal networks) 2) the presence of an aid package (in terms of assets and services) provided by the State, as the citizens rights, to supplement personal assets. Gradually we became aware that it was no longer enough to produce satisfaction (and therefore wellbeing) only through these two elements and reflection on these issues led to consideration of a third element: 3) the importance of the quality of the individuals relations within his family and nonfamily networks and the enormous value represented by the availability of supporting relations, which even manage to compensate for any shortcomings in services and state aid. The far-reaching reflection on social capital is linked to this issue, for example. To gain a complete picture of the elements that today can generate welfare we need to introduce another concept: 4) welfare is greater where the individual not only has a network at his disposal, but also actively self-produces the same. Therefore, not only must the objective of aid change (no longer the individual alone, but the individual plus his relations), but so must the modality of the aid, oriented towards empowerment, to making individuals proactive in the aid process. Efficiency suitable use of resources to achieve set goals. Effectiveness regarding the strategy adopted by the projects to achieve set goals and build networks. Impact the extent of the change that a certain intervention manages or not to introduce in the original starting situation. In other words it tells us whether the strategy used has worked or not. Innovativeness with special reference to the quality of each of the actions put in place by the action, in terms of process, methods and tools, this is also divided into: Innovativeness of the process (organisational structure and management modality, active participation, transnationality, transferability and mainstreaming); Innovativeness of the product (results on a national level, results on a transnational level); Sustainability, intended as the capacity to produce long-lasting benefits both for direct beneficiaries and for the community as a whole. Reproducibility regarding the potential of actions to be replicated in similar contexts.
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Transferability regarding the potential of actions to be replicated in different contexts. Political relevance intended as the capacity of projects to offer a contribution to the implementation of priorities of action and to be in line with local, regional and national political priorities. Evaluation of good practice The AGIL relational scheme (Donati 2006c) helps us to summarise and reorganise all the aspects that must be considered when analysing and evaluating good practice. (A) Efficiency must obviously be examined (the coherence and internal sustainability of the intervention provided, the suitability of means and aims, operator professionalism, ). (G) This device (proven to be efficient) must show that it is capable of achieving the aim for which it was implemented, of effectively addressing the need and this must also be evaluated in terms of environmental impact, of overall improvement of the wellbeing of the relational networks it involves. (I) We must also ask ourselves about the actors who planned and implemented the action, checking that the beneficiarys relational networks were activated as part of a fully relational project, with equal participation by all the actors. In this sense, the optimum situation is that whereby the service/action is promoted by a group of mixed parties (public, private, non-profit) working as partners. To this end it is opportune to recall what Boccacin says on the subject: The perspective of the social partnership is essentially based on the activation of social relations in which the actors are reciprocally subsidiary to the pursuit of shared wellbeing. Distinctive traits are therefore: the presence of reciprocal and subsidiary relations; the co-presence of institutional, market and non-profit parties; the presence of intentional, collaborative and reciprocal actions, based on freely activated relations characterised by a certain temporal stability; the activation of a joint decision-making process; the pursuit of a definite, publicly useful aim; fine-tuning of a shared project, outlined in time and structured over a multi-dimensionality requiring the presence of several interlocutors; pursuit of a shared benefit for the actors involved in the partnership and for the whole community (2007, pp. 156-157). (L) All this is not however enough to be able to call the intervention a good practice, because consideration must still be made of the cultural model that justifies the very aim of the action or as Donati puts it the ethical quality of the aims pursued. The latter is closely linked to empowerment of the individuals and, in the first place, of their family relations, which must emerge neither as just producers (as in the residual welfare model) nor just as consumers (as in the universalistic model), but a prosumers of relational assets (Donati 2006a), in other words produced and
used together in the context of the relational networks of the individuals; finally, it is necessary to check that the principle of subsidiarity is respected in their involvement together with the need for pluralisation, typical of subsidiary welfare. This requisite also proves it is totally respected when a social or society partnership is created to design/provide the service14. As the AGIL scheme in reading relational sociology calls for a dynamic and constantly two-way exchange between all four dimensions, each of these is only explained in relation to the other and thus efficiency attracts effectiveness, effectiveness a network mindset between actors and the ethical quality of the aims returns to complete evaluation of the effectiveness. Social Capital To summarise the overall result of this dialectic, it is particularly significant to reconnect the question of good practices to that of social capital: the linking of the four dimensions leads to a good practice only if it generates social capital for the individuals and their relation networks. As Donati observes, describing the focus of a study into the relationship between the processes of socialisation and the social capital of the families, at the centre of attention is not so much and not only the effectiveness and efficiency of the services, as much as their capacity to generate relational assets, in other words assets created and consumed through reliable social relationships, of a cooperative nature and capable of broadening the support networks for the people who belong to them. [] The distinctive nature of social services to the person is not just their suitability for individual needs, but their capacity to recreate or generate from scratch person-centric support social networks, in other words to enhance the social capital of their community (Donati 2006b, p. 12). The close link between social capital and good practices in services to the person therefore clearly emerges. The relational approach helps to find the key for making circular reasoning comprehensible, overturning the paradox that treats social capital and relationships as if they were two separate entities and sustains that it is inaccurate to say that relationships have social capital, it being more correct to state that social capital is a social relationship, in other words that form of relationship that makes the most of assets or services through exchanges that are neither monetary, nor political, nor favouritism-based, nor purely gifts, but social exchanges of reciprocity (Donati 2007b. p.18). It is important to understand what the driver behind the exchange is: expected practised gratuity, first of all a gift of trust, in turn triggering off willingness to cooperate and reciprocity. Therefore social capital is a social relationship based on trust that leads to reciprocal cooperation. As it is a relationship, social capital can be analysed with AGIL and Donati identifies the following dimensions (id., p. 19): (A) economic (tool for achieving other aims); (G) political (strategy for achieving a shared goal); (I) legislative (based on trust, the capacity to cooperate and reciprocity);
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The descriptor society is used for virtuous social partnerships
(L) value inherent (with its own value, regardless of other goals that through this can be achieved). Having said this, it is clear how social capital cannot be seen as a resource to be drawn on or activated by individuals in a certain limited context 15. On the contrary it could be said that it is a way of relating limits and resources in the context, inserting them into a process of reciprocal exchange between persons who trust and cooperate with each other. In this sense, the first relation of social capital, the source of trust, reciprocity and opening towards others, is the family. This is the capital whose erosion is causing a general weakening of the social link, undermining the basic bonds of society. Who can stop this process and how? Strengthening family and community relations (primary social capital) and thus regenerating the possibility that individuals learn the art of trust in others and civil undertaking in their local area (secondary social capital)?
FAMILY SOCIAL CAPITAL
MEMBERSHIP SOCIAL CAPITAL
PRIMARY SOCIAL CAPITAL
SECONDARY SOCIAL CAPITAL
COMMUNITY SOCIAL CAPITAL
GENERALIZED SOCIAL CAPITAL
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15
Figure 1 The virtuous circle of primary and secondary social capital (source: Carr 2008)
The relational approach replies that the specialist in this task is the Third sector, which generates membership social capital, between family/community and generalised social capital, and capable of promoting both in a virtuous circle, whose outcome
This recalls the primary agency concept of Archer (2006), namely the set of limits and opportunities at the disposal of an individual, collocated in a certain social context.
16 17
Gittell & Vidal (1998); Narayan (2002); Putnam (2000). As defined by Donati and Colozzi in the most recent publication on the issue (edited, 2007).
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is the production of relational assets. (Figure 1). As Donati states, the remit of the Third sector is to generate social capital, in other words reliable cooperative relation networks that support full human development of individuals and social groups, creating that shared public area that is increasingly more necessary in a multicultural society (Donati 2006b, p. 12). Regeneration of each of the forms of social capital is linked to implementation of a virtuous circularity between them (Figure 1): community capital encourages the family version, which promotes the generalised form, which in turn makes regeneration of the other two possible. For the circular process to be triggered it is however necessary for each of the three levels to have an inclination for going beyond limits, expanding the trust and networks of reciprocal collaboration. On this question, several authors16 have identified what we could consider as two functions17 of social capital: Bonding according to this function, social capital strongly links the subjects in their relative networks, acting as a glue, creating identification and developing relationships of reciprocity and solidarity again active within the group, so that it tends to be exclusive Bridging according to this function social capital is more inclusive, it builds bridges and connects different people and different contexts, facilitates the formation of networks or of relationships between networks and other external subjcts.. Although this distinction is effective, it must be clear that what makes a network a place that generates social capital is not, first and foremost, the degree of strength or weakness of its links, but the type of reciprocal and collaborative behaviour practised within it. The distinction between the bridging and bonding function of social capital emerges as having a precise utility from an analytical point of view, allowing the different characteristics of the networks to be captured and differentiated according to their opening to the outside. These functions, however, can co-exist together within the same network and should not, therefore, be seen as alternatives a priori. Each network, in order to be a generator of social capital, must have at one and the same time a bridging direction, to extend code reciprocity and trust as far as possible in a social context and bonding direction, in order not to lose its identity (fundamental in the case of third sector organisations) when it is active beyond its own borders. So far the concept of social capital has been analysed from a point of view of how it can differ, based on the contexts that produce it and orientation of the link towards the inside (bonding) or outside (bridging). The final stage is to focus on who can generate or regenerate the social capital and how or, in other words, who can put good practices in place. We have seen how in the relational approach a simple establishment of links between social subjects is not enough to produce social capital, even if the social capital consists of relational processes (Donati 2007b, p. 26). In these processes in fact,
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18
Symbolic exchange refers to the exchange of immaterial, symbolic, cultural and affective assets.
19
See also Carr (2008).
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specific trust must circulate, in other words trust that encourages cooperation, not just in any sense, but in a logic of reciprocity, of symbolic exchange18. This only happens if the relationship is considered to be an asset itself, if it does not appear to a be a mere tool for achieving an objective that in the end makes its survival irrelevant. The causal relation between relationships and resources of an economic nature and that between relationships and goals of a public kind would seem to be crucial. There is social capital if we start with a certain set of relationships and we use means and resources of an economic type to promote, enhance and increase them. This does not exist if, starting with insufficient means and resources, we use the relationships (in a temporary, time-limited manner) to increase means and resources. In the same way establishing relationships for producing a public asset/service, which, once it has been created then become useless, is not a process that generates social capital. It seems we must therefore exclude that social capital can be gathered and generated in social spheres different from those for which the relationships are in themselves a cause and a means to an end, in other words the spheres of social private and vital worlds. From this it would appear that good practices are only those created by subjects of this kind, because only in a context of private social and family networks is the sequence relationship > asset produced > relationship. Third sector organisations in fact generally base their work on a spirit of solidarity (gratuitousness as a starting motor for social capital), the aid offered focuses on the relationship between service providers and recipients and it is fundamental that a climate of trust is installed. This operational code allows third sector organisations to increase, through their presence, the social capacity of the community to which they belong (Donati and Colozzi, eds, 2004), promoting the personalisation viewpoint fundamental to new welfare. This style of intervention is gradually making its way into the context of services to people not only provided by the third sector, but also by public subjects. Work by networks, empowerment and pro-active planning are today part of a common language for social operators. This leads us to wonder about the possibility that public subjects also manage through their practices to increase the social capital of the community they work in, thus putting good practices in place. The relational processes included in the sphere of social capital are never just one-sided (either public or non-profit), there are unexpected effects that derive from how they are planned and put in place, that can never be determined beforehand by the context at the outset, by the fact of being public or non-profit. Where the service is planned and put in place in a relational way, even if the relationship initially were not a means to an end, it becomes this due to its internal strength and social capital is regenerated. When, on the other hand, a third sector subject does not manage to fully address the logic of caring, the social capital will remain closed within its organisational borders and only there will increase, without however helping to regenerate that of the recipients and of their community.
A roadmap for analysing good practices The idea of good practice gradually establishes itself as a model for planning and evaluating services, in particular those provided to people. If it does not follow a precise model of welfare, the idea of good practice is reduced to an empty concept and does not meet its definition: good are practices promoted by a good model of welfare, in other words by subsidiary and plural welfare. Practices of this kind increase the primary social capital of the subjects and broader community. The reference schema is the relational analysis by Donati (2006d)19 which follows a method based on five rules: 1. when studying a phenomenon, it must first of all be decided whether to carry out an observation that is descriptive (merely giving the facts) or problematic (looking for the causes); 2. secondly, the fact must be observed as a social relation, analysing it with the AGIL relational scheme, in other words identifying Adaptation (means/resources used/available), Goals, Integration (rules observed) and Latency (underlying value model); 3. it must then be hypothesised that the reason explaining the phenomenon observed consists in a set of factors that interfere in an obscure way with the social relation (AGIL), namely that between the causes and the phenomenon there is a black box inside which a reaction occurs that will never be completely revealed; 4. the phenomenon production process is read as a morphostasis/morphogenesis from a basic relation structure (hypothetical initial structure) into another final relation asset (emerging structure), through the variations and interactions produced by causal factors; 5. and finally, where requested by the production process analysis of a certain phenomenon indications can be gathered for intervention, according to the logic of the ODG model (observation diagnosis guidance); during this last stage, the problematic observation also becomes evaluation (in other words capable of distinguishing between satisfactory and unsatisfactory, normal and pathological, capable, in our case, of differentiating a good practice from one that is not) and this lays the foundations for the results of the observation to be reintroduced into the process and become new causal factors for starting new morphogenesis of the phenomenon into a condition that is better than its initial one. The overall path, including this last stage, would appear particularly suitable for application to the study of good practices. These in fact are relational phenomena, which regenerate social capital. We can therefore imagine that between the initial relation, which specifically combines a series of elements to create a service to the person, and the final outcome (the regenerated social capital) there lies a process of morphogenesis, which brings with it the specific result of a good practice, whose
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requisites interact inside a black box. Let us then attempt to interpret the five rules in the analysis of a good practice. 1. We ask ourselves, first of all, why is the practice good? 2. The first stage of ODG (observation) is used to analyse the service/action as a social relation, identifying (first box in Figure 2): the objective of the action (which also entails research into what problem/need is addressed by the action (G), the means it uses (A), the intervention methodologies and ways of relating between subjects (I), the value model it meets (L). 3. It is hypothesised that the capacity to adequately address the need depends on the simultaneous occurrence of all the dimensions of the phenomenon (A-G-I-L) and on the validity of each of these taken individually, in other words on the fact that means, methodologies and the goal itself of the action are suited to the problem to be solved, but also reciprocally congruent. In this case the effectiveness/efficiency within the service is considered. 4. Passage from the third to the fourth rule introduces the evaluation criterion and moves onto the diagnosis stage of the ODG model (second box in Figure 2). Morphostasis or morphogenesis in this case mean the processes underlying continuation or improvement in the process of implementing plural or subsidiary welfare. Here the efficiency/effectiveness of the service/action is no longer analysed solely from an internal point of view, but questioned as to real capacity of the service to help to improving welfare and increasing primary and secondary social capital. A service that responds to an allocation model (of value) with the aim of assisting/ replacing might be functional and efficient internally, but results in the erosion and not the regeneration of the recipients social capital. The new AGIL, detailed in the second box in Figure 2, does not replace the previous one, but is a way of reinterpreting how the service works from four different points of view (expressed by the initial AGIL), in this way: efficiency (A): - is there congruity between means and aims? - is the project sustainable over time? - can it capitalise on the experience gained or does it disperse it? effectiveness (G): - does it promote empowerment of the recipients? - does it increase primary, community and generalised capital? relations (I): - was the service planned/implemented in a proactive way right from identification of the need/problem to be addressed? - does its implementation involve the beneficiaries? - does it adopt an operational strategy based on a relational guidance
perspective20 (can it as a reflex include evaluation results)? ethical quality of the aims (L): - is it suitable for implementation of plural subsidiary welfare? Is it based on society partnership? - does it aim to achieve relational wellbeing? - does it introduce added value (pluralise) to the range of services? All this entails consideration of the actors involved in its implementation and checking that there is active participation also by third sector subjects. 5. Finally (ODG) (third box in Figure 2), if analysis of the good practice was carried out from a relational intervention perspective, in addition to answering the initial question why is it a good practice?, observation and evaluation must be readmitted into the planning and revision process of the service with a view to improving the latter and therefore reinserted into the morphogenetic process.
OBSERVATION THE PROBLEM/NEED ADDRESSED BY THE ACTION
DIAGNOSIS
increase in recipients primary social capital
RELATIONAL GUIDANCE
congruity means/aims
goal of the interbvention
relational model of planning/ implementation of the action
effectiveness rules methods
REFLEXIVITY: reintroduction of the out come into the frame work of the hypothesis
means used
efficiency
relations
value model
ethical qualities of the aims

focused on plural subsidiary welfare Actor (or partnership) managing the project
proactive revision
Figure 2 Observation, diagnosis, relational guidance of a good practice (Source: Carr 2008)
In conclusion, applying the relational analysis method to the study of good practices
20
To fully understand what is meant when we talk of relational guidance please see the paper by Folgheraiter (2007b), which illustrates the role of facilitators as part of services that can be called good practices.
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analysis of a relational service
evaluation of goodness of the practice
relational guidance
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allows us to reconstruct a theoretical frame that recuperates most of the indicators, suggested in the context of the vast number of guidelines for implementation/evaluation of good practices and inserts them coherently into a roadmap where the goodness of the action is reconnected to subsidiary welfare, distinctive criteria are the relationality of the action and the increase in social capital and the analysis serves not only to describe but also to evaluate. Bibliography Boccacin L. (2007), Progettare e realizzare partnership sociali nei servizi alla famiglia: unanalisi comparata dei tre studi di caso, in Rossi G. and Boccacin L. (eds), Capitale sociale e partnership tra pubblico, privato e terzo settore. Casi di buone pratiche nei servizi alla famiglia. Volume I, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 151-76. Bramanti D.(2007), Buone pratiche relazionali per la famiglia e per la comunit: tre casi a confronto, in Rossi G. and Boccacin L. (eds), Capitale sociale e partnerships tra pubblico, privato e terzo settore. Casi di buone pratiche nei servizi alla famiglia. Volume I, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 208-228. Carr E. (2008), Buone pratiche e capitale sociale. Servizi alla persona pubblici e di privato sociale a confronto, Led, Milan. Donati P. (2006a), Un nuovo modo di analizzare, valutare e implementare le buone prassi nei servizi alla famiglia: il modello relazionale, in Donati P. and Prandini R. (eds), Buone pratiche e servizi innovativi per la famiglia, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 546-567. Donati P. (2006b), Introduzione. Chi e come valorizza il capitale sociale nei processi di socializzazione delle nuove generazioni, in Donati P. and Colozzi I. (eds), Capitale sociale delle famiglie e processi di socializzazione. Un confronto fra le scuole statali e di privato sociale, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 9-17. Donati P. (2006c), Schema AGIL, in Donati P. (Ed) (2006), Sociologia. Una introduzione allo studio della societ, Cedam, Padua, pp. 254-255. Donati P. (2006d), Lanalisi relazionale: regole, quadro metodologico, esempi, in Donati P. (ed) (2006), Sociologia. Una introduzione allo studio della societ, Cedam, Padua, pp. 195-251. Donati P. (2007a), La qualit sociale del welfare familiare: le buone pratiche nei servizi alle famiglie, in Donati P. (ed), Famiglie e bisogni sociali: la frontiera delle buone prassi, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 421-448. Donati P. (2007b), Lapproccio relazionale al capitale sociale, in Donati P. (ed), Il capitale sociale. Lapproccio relazionale, Sociologia e politiche sociali, X, 1, pp. 9-39. Donati P. e Colozzi I. (Eds) (2004), Il terzo settore in Italia. Culture e pratiche, Franco Angeli, Milan. Donati P. e Colozzi I. (Eds) (2007), Terzo settore, mondi vitali e capitale sociale, Franco Angeli, Milan. Folgheraiter F . (1998), Teoria e metodologia del servizio sociale: la prospettiva di rete, Franco Angeli, Milan.
Folgheraiter F . (2007a), La logica sociale dellaiuto: fondamenti per una teoria relazionale del welfare, Erickson, Trento. Folgheraiter F . (2007b), Quale professionalit per la facilitazione delle reti?, in Rossi G. and Boccacin L. (eds), Capitale sociale e partnerships tra pubblico, privato e terzo settore. Casi di buone pratiche nei servizi alla famiglia. Volume I, Franco Angeli, Milan, pp. 229-239. Gittell R. & Vidal A. (1998), Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA. Narayan D. (2002), Bonds and Bridges: Social Capital and Poverty, in Isham J., Kelly T. & Ramaswamy S. (eds), Social Capital and Economic Development: Well-Being in Developing Countries, Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA, pp. 58-81. Putnam R.D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, New York.
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5.2. Guidelines for a plan to monitor and evaluate the quality of actions by Stefania Meda
1. The first priority is to identify all the possible stakeholders to be consulted: project contact operators users/beneficiaries and/or their families, (the contacts of partner organisations) 2. Secondly, a timescale for the monitoring must be drawn up (depending on the needs
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of the E&M process and available resources). It would be a good idea to work out a study period covering at least 6-12 months, in order to see evolution of the project from T1 to Tx and to be able to effectively introduce re-orientation elements for the programme, as suggested for retroaction of monitoring in progress: T1 needs assessment T2 goals set according to needs analysis T3 resources, actions, tools for achieving goals. 3. Thirdly, it is necessary to establish what to ask each category of respondents and put in place suitable monitoring tools, following the table below:
Tool Summary start-up sheet Detailed sheet Graph of the network Draft interview with lead entity Draft interview with managers of partner entities Respondents Compiled over the phone or from documents Project/service manager Project/service manager Project/service manager Managers (with knowledge of the Project) only if the Entity they represent is involved in direct actions Voluntary Operators (possibly from different network entities) (groups of 8-10) As an alternative to focus N 1 1 1 1 Code 0 A B C
Analysis of a relational service The problem/need addressed by the action A G I L means used objective of the action method rules value model Evaluation of the goodness of the practice A Efficiency > is there congruity between means and aim? > is the project sustainable over time? > can it capitalise on the experience gained or does it disperse it? G Effectiveness > does it promote empowerment of the recipients? > does it increase primary, community and generalised social capital? I Relationality > was the service planned/implemented in a proactive way right from identification of the need/problem to be addressed? > does its implementation involve the beneficiaries? > does it evaluate actions and is it able to use the results in a reflective manner? L Ethical quality of the aim > is the service suitable for implementation of plural subsidiary welfare? > does it aim to achieve relational wellbeing? > does it introduce added value (pluralise) to the range of services? show the connection between the service and subsidiary and plural social policies (active involvement of the non-profit sector) show that the wellbeing of the beneficiary is seen as closely linked to that of his or her family relations show that the service tangibly enriches the response to this kind of need explain the features of any partnership or the presence of a network of subjects actively involved in every stage show how active involvement of the beneficiaries is guaranteed show if periodic evaluation is carried out, with results leading to a process of rethinking about the service show how empowerment of the recipients is promoted show how the beneficiaries relational networks are enriched, their trust increased and the capacity of cooperating reciprocally in achieving the goal is promote. How this positively affects the community and relations with the society it must be understood if the resources used are suitable and also if this is a service allowing certain savings compared to other more traditional services is this a project linked to temporary funding or does it have a certain degree of stability? is its implementation linked to the presence of who devised and started it or can (could) continue even without these people? human resources aims of the action and target (show that the recipients are families and not individuals) work methodology guidance idea, inspiring principles, philosophy addressed
2/3
Draft interview with operators Draft for focus with users or family members Draft interview with users or family members
3 1 4/5
D E F
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See ATTACHMENTS When all the necessary material has been gathered and analysed the table analysing good practices must be compiled.
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For each case studied, the following will also be gathered: Documents relative to planning and implementation of the service Final and ongoing evaluation documents (if available) Materials created specifically and/or used (information material for users, )
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5.2.1. Attachments: monitoring and evaluation tools 1. Preliminary form for measuring project/service The form must give a preliminary indication (over the phone or using a variety of documents) of information that helps to understand if this is a service/action that takes the users family into consideration, as the parties involved in its implementation, (formalised or even informal network), its importance in terms of quantity (no. of subjects involved/no. of operators), of innovativeness, of duration. Territorial are: ..
Project name Lead Entity Other parties in the network (indicate if there are any partnerships, whether formal or informal, with other parties of another type) Contact Person Contacts e-mail/phone Year of Project implementation Ongoing/finished Geographical area Recipients / users/ importance for the territory
2. Form for lead entity manager Structural dimensions

Name of the service/action Territorial sector Lead entity/promoter Period of activity Subject in the network Public bodies 1. Health services 2. Social service 3. Consortia 4. Hospitals 5. Municipalities 6. Councillors 7. Family or other (specify) Third sector entities 8. Voluntary organisations 9. Pro-social associations 10. Parish/Other religious communities 11. Foundations (specify what kind) 12. Family associations 13. Informal networks Indicate with which of these subjects a formal agreement has been signed for implementation of the project Who is involved in project decisions? (Only indicate those subjects who actually took part in the decision making) During the Project how often did the coordinating group/table meet up? On a scale of 1 to 5 what score would you give overall to subject participation? On a scale of 1 to 5 what score would you give overall to the degree of equality between subjects? On an scale of 1 to 5 what score would you give overall to the degree of trust between subjects? On a scale of 1 to 5 what score would you give overall to the degree of reciprocity between subjects? On a scale of 1 to 5 what score would you give overall to the subjects capacity to cooperate?
Subjects making up the network
From year ....................................... to year ........................... Present? Which?
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
NO NO NO NO
YES YES YES YES
NO
YES Give the order number used to identify them above
Year ...............
Give the order number used to identify them above Every week Every 6 months 1 2 Every 2 weeks At the start 3 Every month At the end 4 Other (specify) 5
Brief overview of Project content
aims
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methodology (network action, mediation, self-mutual-help group, etc.) methods for involving families and informal networks Why can it be considered a good practice? Strong points Compiled by
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Relationality
Did the service allow expansion of the network of subjects/entities that collaborate to meet the need? How did the network contribute to the success of the project?
3. Draft interview for service manager (lead entity) (it could also be used with the Managers of the other partner Entities) AIMS GOALS CULTURE OF THE SERVICE - What is the specific goal of the project/service . for which your Entity is leader? - What needs does it address in this territory? - Do you think this action was family-friendly? In what sense? Does it promote family relations? In what sense? - What already exits in this territory and what is lacking Are there any other bodies working on similar issues? Can they be partners? If not, why not? - What is your reference intervention methodology? Whose idea was it? Had these subjects already worked together? Who provided the funding? Was planning shared? Which subjects were involved? Was monitoring carried out? Was shared evaluation of the results carried out? - What is your reference intervention methodology? What are the internal strengths of the NGO in terms of both material resources (funding, structures, etc.) and immaterial resources (personnel, teamwork, etc.)? Is there collaboration between operators? Is there teamwork? How would you describe relations with the other operators? On a level of beneficiaries, do the families associate with other families? Is any form of collaboration foreseen with other subjects/entities/organisations? Which? Following which modalities? How would you describe relations with any partners? (strong points and criticalities) - Is the service linked to the presence of temporary funding (if so, say which) or is it stable? (it has already completed that stage, it was never linked to projects) - Are those who thought up the service (the initial creators) still involved? If so, would the service be able to continue even without these people? - Has the experience been exported into other contexts? Or was the service modelled on other similar services? - What material and immaterial resources (professionalism, contacts, explicit support..) are used by the service? Which is the main resource? Which was the most lacking? What were the difficulties? The criticalities? - Were any indirect results achieved with the action? E.g. a group of self-mutualhelp, a place for users/family members to socialise - Were the goals achieved?
Service recipients/participants: direct and indirect

Who are the beneficiaries? (children, mothers, family members.) How many were involved during the past year?
N .....
N family members
N others
How were the recipients involved?
Do any other subjects actively participate?
Economic dimensions
How much does the service cost annually?
How many people work for it?
N operators
N total hours
Who funds the service?
Were any other significant resources used, apart from funds? Do you think that the service saves money, costs more, does not affect costs in addressing the need for which it was created?
Indicate which
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1.
it saves money 2.
has no effect
3.
costs more
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- Were the results monitored? Is periodic evaluation carried out and what tools are used? - What impact did it have in the district, the territory? - Future: what is the project lacking and what could still be done to meet the needs of the families? In your opinion, why could the service be considered a good practice? REMEMBER TO REQUEST A COPY OF ANY AVAILABLE MATERIAL REGARDING THE PROJECT AND EVALUATION CARRIED OUT. 4. Grid For Interviewing Operators (Educators, Group Organisers, Volunteers, Parents) (This semi-structured interview must be used with a variable number of now fewer than 3 operators selected for each service) (In the interview refer to concrete cases / examples) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What role do you play in this service? What is your remit? What tasks do you carry out? For which beneficiaries (are there different kinds of beneficiaries)? Was planning shared? Which subjets were involved? What goals will this service pursue? What was your opinion at the start? Where are you up to? Which elements made it easier for you to achieve these goals? Who or which structures do you feel support you in your work with the families? Which did you feel were a hindrance? Is any form of collaboration foreseen with other subjects/entities/organisations? Which? Following what modalities? How would you describe relations with any partners? (strong points and criticalities) What already exists in this territory and what is lacking? Are there any other bodies working on similar issues? Can they be partners? If not, why not? What was the greatest satisfaction attained? Were there any unexpected results that proved to be significant (innovativeness)? What should be done, that was not possible due to a lack of resources (human, economic, time: specify)? Effectiveness Can you give me a concrete result you achieved with your work? What benefits do you think users received with this kind of action? Were other subjects in the recipients network involved and activated (natural caregivers)? Do you think this action was a family action? In what sense? Does it promote family relations? In what sense?
- Do you think the sense of self-sufficiency of the service recipients increased? Were they enhanced? Did they feel they were protagonists of the action (the empowerment effect)? - Do you think it is easy for users to access this service? - Do you work in a team with other service operators? - How do you evaluate relations with other service operators in terms of trust, cooperation, reciprocity? - Satisfaction Are you happy to be working in this service? Why? Do you think the users or the user in the specific case you told me about are/is happy with your work? Why? - Future How do you see the future of this service? In your opinion, why could the service be considered a good practice? 5. Focus grid for users/family members (This tool can be used with a small group of people (8-12 max) who used the service) The group is made to work on a task by the interviewer, in sequence: Free association task (individual and then shared with the group): I would like each of you to choose 3 adjectives/words or 3 images to explain to me the significance of the INSERT NAME project that you took part in last year/are taking part in. (Ask group to write the words written on an anonymous sheet of paper, share, collect). The focus could continue with brainstorming using the papers above as a starting point 6.Draft guided interview for users/family members 1.If you think of the service you took part in, what words come to mind? Try and write down three: .. 2. What was the most positive aspect of the service? .. 3. What was most difficult about the service? ..
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4. Thinking about your family situation, what improvements have been made to your quality of life? .. 5. Apart from you, who took part in the . service? (a family member, a friend) ..
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Who we are
AVSI Foundation (www.avsi.org) is an international, non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1972, with headquarters in Milan, Italy and an office in Washington, DC. Globally, AVSIs mission is to support human development in developing countries according to the social teaching of the Catholic Church, with special attention to education and promotion of the global dignity of every person. Since 1991, AVSI has been registered as a PVO with USAID, and is officially recognized by the Italian Government and the European Union. AVSI holds general consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, New York, with UNICEF, New York and is listed in the ILO Special List of NGOs. At present, AVSI is operating in 38 countries in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the Middle East and South-East Asia in the following sectors: social and educational, distance support, urban development, healthcare, work, agriculture, food security and water, energy and environment, humanitarian emergency, migrations, international adoptions. More than 60 organizations now make up the informal AVSI network, which works systematically on the implementation of projects, common reflection on development, to share methods and experiences. The network includes founding members and participating members, but also partners. A network bound by operative friendship. Drawing on AVSIs methodological approach that focuses on the needs of the person in his/her entirety and on partnerships with local institutions, AVSIs programs and those of networked organizations often extend into more than one sector and across the divisions of civil society, business, and the state. This crosssectoral and community-level approach makes each intervention more effective and sustainable. AVSI-USA is a not-for profit organization registered as a PVO with USAID, with headquarters in New York and an office in Washington, DC, that supports the AVSI network by leveraging resources and contacts in the US in order to enhance and broaden the achievements of member organizations in promoting human dignity in developing countries.
where the fulfillment of life and the awareness of meaning are already being lived. With this ultimate goal and guided by the following principles, AVSI does not create dependency, but helps individuals and communities address their own present and future needs through education and building permanent and sustainable institutions. Centrality of the person The person is seen as a unique being in his or her fundamental relationships, family and society. The person cannot be reduced to a social category or a limitation such as poverty, disease or disability. Starting from the positive Every person and every community represents a potential resource, regardless of their vulnerability. This means valuing and strengthening all that has been made by people and also helping people to understand their own value and dignity. Doing with Starting from a relationship with the people to whom the project is directed and building with them on the basis of their development path. Development of Civil Society and Subsidiarity Development projects must favor associations, ackowledgment and must value the establishment of intermediate bodies along with responsible and engaged social fabric. Partnership Promotion of partnerships with all the actors in the field in order to favor synergies and optimize available resources. FOR MORE INFORMATION Fondazione AVSI www.avsi.org AVSI-USA www.avsi-usa.org 529 14th Street, NW Suite 994, Washington, DC 20045 ph/fax: (202) 429-9009 - email: infoavsi-usa@avsi.org AVSI Italy www.avsi.org 20158 Milano Via Legnone 4 tel. +39.02.6749.881 milano@avsi.org 47521 Cesena (FC) Via Padre Vicino da Sarsina, 216 tel. +39.0547.360.811 cesena@avsi.org
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Method
AVSI, relying in a particular way on its personnel in the field working side by side with local partners, holds education as the overall goal of each cultural, social and economic project and initiative. Education cannot be reduced to schooling, training sessions, or information campaigns; instead, to educate means to introduce ourselves and one another to reality, to its meaning and to the value of things, thereby sustaining the individuals responsible undertaking to better his/her life and the lives of others. An education to reality entails sharing an experience, through a relationship,
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itascabili 9 Haiti buds of hope

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itascabili 11 Evaluation as experience of knowledge The OVC program in the Great Lake Region - Africa
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Italian/English/Spanish
AVSI Italy 20158 Milan Via Legnone, 4 tel. +39 02 6749881 milano@avsi.org 47521 Cesena (FC) Via Padre Vicinio da Sarsina, 216 tel. +39 0547 360811 cesena@avsi.org
AVSI USA DC Office: 529 14th Street NW Suite 994 Washington, DC 20045 Ph/Fax: +1.202.429.9009 infoavsi-usa@avsi.org www.avsi-usa.org

AVSI Beauty of The Family

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AVSI Beauty of The Family

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itascabili

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The experience in Burundi

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again Pocket-edition n.11

The experience in Ecuador

The experience in Romania

Family: reections upon the experience

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The experience in Burundi

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

1.3. The centre

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

enterprise, farming activity) for the creation of small income-earning busi-

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

1.4. Ongoing case histories

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

1.5. Advantages and disadvantages of the centre

Knowledge, competences and capacities

1.6. What we need in order to improve

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The experience in Ecuador

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

2.2. The context and AVSIs intervention

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

2.3. Innovative and methodological aspects of work done

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

3.3. Projects and numbers of families supported

As well as four European Social Fund projects:

3.4. First exploration: hiv-positive minors

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again

The family, a beauty to be conquered once again