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Newsletter Make the difference | Juni 2022
In May 2022, the EU-funded project has reached the half-time mark of the project! As expected, the pandemic has affected the project’s work plan, especially the local cooperation process. Therefore, project partners' work towards a binding coorperation agreement has partly been delayed.
The first year ended with a workshop (5-7 April 2022) with 47 participants from 12 EU countries in Coimbra, Portugal. The participants came from partner organisations in addiction help/prevention and their cooperation partners from youth welfare or social services. The main goal of the workshop was to exchange experiences and to plan the next steps.
Introduced: Online Office hours
The Coordinator (LWL, Germany) has introduced regular online office hours for the project partners to promote learning from each other. There have been similar obstacles in the process for the beneficiaries, so these meetings helped them to move forward.
Pompidou group published new research
During the Workshop in Coimbra, Corina Giacomello and Florence Mabileau from the "Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe" presented the recently published report "Children whose parents use drugs - Promising practices and recommendations".
First agreements signed!
The project partners are currently preparing cooperation agreements together with the local cooperation partners concerning the work with families with addiction problems. The agreements willl be signed during spring/summer and will be implementing their agreements during the remainder of the project year and hopefully beyond. At the date of publication, first cooperation agreements have been signed.
Signature event in Greece!
Participating in Make the Difference (MTD) has been an educational experience for us in ‘ATHINA YGIA’. Working primarily in the addiction prevention field, children and parents (or other caregivers) have always been our main target groups with a focus on enhancing skills (confidence, respect, empathy, listening etc.) and promoting social and emotional learning. With MTD we are getting the opportunity to use what we already know for children with multiple vulnerabilities, i.e. children growing up in households with addiction issues. And the important thing is that we get to do that in good company: with other professionals from all over Europe on the one hand and with family help systems in our own area on the other.
In MTD, our prevention center ‘ATHINA YGIA’ started a cooperation with the Directorate of Social Solidarity of the Municipality of Athens and two of its departments: the Department of Equality & Antidiscrimination Policies / Substance Abuse Sector and the Department of Social Services / Child Protection Sector.
The fruitful cooperation has been validated with the signing of a written agreement between the two partners on May 20th, 2022 in an interactive event with co-workers and stakeholders. This important experience of a structured cooperation will be disseminated throughout the network of 75 prevention centers that operate all over Greece.
With this written agreement the aim is to cultivate a culture of long-term communication and cooperation between the two partners. Other goals include: enhancing protective factors and reducing risk factors related to the well-being of children living in family environments with addiction issues, designing and implementing a prevention program for these children based on the mentoring approach, identifying families with addiction issues and mobilizing them for voluntary participation in appropriate for them programs or services and raising awareness for: 1. the destigmatization of individuals and families associated with addiction and 2. the visibility of children living in such families.
‘ATHINA YGIA’ will be dedicating the last half of June 2022, with the occasion of June 26th, the International Day against Drug Abuse & Illicit Trafficking, on the subject of the prevention of the endangerment to the welfare of children living in households with addiction issues with one-day-conferences, social media posts and press releases.
Natalia Tzovara on behalf of the Greek team
Training for social workers on "Families with addiction issues" in Belgium!
In Belgium, Ligant is a mental health network for children and young people. It offers low-threshold, accessible and high-quality care with the basic assumption that every child with a mental health vulnerability and the child's environment are entitled to mental health care assistance.
Many children today grow up in a family with a parent who struggles with mental health and/or addiction problems. Research has shown that children of these parents have a greater risk of displaying psychological problems themselves. To avoid this, it is important to pay attention to this and to offer the necessary help and support to these children in time.
A lot of social workers are not used to working with children or feel insecure to discuss a psychiatric problem of a parent with the child. Also, talking to adult clients about parenting is rarely done. The goal of the “Crosslink team” of Ligant is to strengthen social workers in this area. This is done by offering tailor made trainings and a 3-day training for social workers in different sectors twice a year.
In this training we strive for an integrated approach and ask: How to pay attention to children when talking to parents? How to pay attention to parents when talking to children?
During this training we name the risk and protective factors of these children and teach the participants how to strengthen the resilience of the child. We do this by introducing the ‘Child Reflex’. The first goal of the Child Reflex is to make ‘parenting’ a topic in every adult counselling. The second goal is to make an assessment of the welfare and safety of the child. Additionally, we introduce several methodologies which can be used when talking to children about the mental illness or addiction of the parent. All methodologies are collected in the suitcase ‘on a journey with Kriebel’.
Both, the 'Child Reflex' and the concept of ‘On a journey with Kriebel’ are part of the MTD curriculum (see below). This can be used as an inspiration for organisations that want to offer a training about this topic because prevention for this target group is very much needed!
by Ellen Gibney on behalf of the Belgian team
Curriculum available for download
Acurriculum for professionals has been published with accompanying material
Module 3 of the curriculum includes an explanatory video about the "Child Reflex", a road map developed in Belgium for working with parents with addiction issues.
... following the approach of "Balu und Du"
Another pillar of the MTD project is the implementation of a mentoring approach following the German programme "Balu und Du" (Baloo and You). The project partners will implement a mentoring approach as one potential offer for children from families with addiction issues while following the quality critera of Balu und Du. With the aim to sustainably embedd the offer, the project partners will connect to existing structures in their countries.
Copy Right: Balu und Du e.V.
