Description
The project brings complex support for children and adolescents growing up in foster care. The support will include providing of social, psychological services and consultancy to the target group through regular meetings, variety of activities and the preparation of a specialized website for the target group (children and adolescents in the age of 9-18 growing up in foster care in the Czech Republic). The project reflects existing demand for such activities. There is a lack of such complex services and accessible communication platform (as specialized web pages) where children in foster care could share experiences and find proper information. The main objective of the project is to support integration of children and adolescents growing up in foster care. The applicant is the Centre for Adoption and Foster Care (SNRP), Czech non-profit organization that deals with the issue of adoption and foster care since its foundation in 1994.
Summary of project results
The project Ponton Club was developed as the answer for the needs of the substitute families who are using the services of our organization. We realized that programs or services for adoptive families do not exist even though adoptive families have similar problems as the families taking care of foster children. These families showed an interest to connect their children with the children who can have similar needs, experiences and background. Such important reasons were behind the idea of Ponton Club - safe environment where the children can open their personal topics related to the life in non biological family. Families can also benefit from the consultations in the social, law or therapeutic areas, offered by personal (phone line) or internet connection of our organization. We created a new informational website
www.pontonclub.cz, where children, teenagers or adolescents can share their topics and find useful information for the next independent epoch of their life - adulthood. The main goal of the project was the prevention of unsuccessful integration of children growing up in a substitution care into society. We organized 50 meetings of support groups /mornings, evenings, daylong and weekend times/ for 23 children. In response to the clients' needs we reduced the number of the reunions (28 less) but we increased the number of the hours for each meeting so the time allocation have been complied (more daylong meetings, the whole weekend stay, the day camps for the children). The number of clients increased to 66 (11 people more than expected). We provided 123 consultations including psychological and therapeutic service. The new website pontonclub.cz was visited 6324 times.
Summary of bilateral results