SOCIAL ACTIVATION SERVICES for FAMILIES with CHILDREN

STREP has established three Child and Family Help Centres, in the City of Prague and in the City of Kladno, in the Town of Beroun, with the aim of the provision of social services. These centres provide free-of-charge social activation services for families with children in the accordance with the Social Services Act.

Social activation services for families with children are terrain or ambulatory services provided to families with children whose development is at risk owing to the impacts of the long-term critical social situation that the parents are not able to cope with by themselves without any professional help.

WHAT

The main activities within these services are the following:

• Education and activation activities (for example - support of parenting, running a household, help to work out a family budget, social competences training).
• Mediation of contact with social environments (for example - agreement with children and parents on school attendance of children, support of contacts between parents and medical and educational facilities, recommendations of other professional services, leisure-time activities, etc.).
• Social therapeutic activities (for example - parenting skills training in families, in the course of visits at medical or educational facilities, behaviour training of parents at difficult situations, creation of "crisis plans" for the possible risk situations of the family).
• Assistance in asserting rights, interests and in attending to personal matters (for example - support of contact with the family, accompanying to the dealings at state offices, negotiating in the interest of the clients at institutions).

WHY

The most frequent aims of the provision of these social services by STREP to families and endangered children from 0 to 15 years of age are the following:

• Reducing the risks of removal of the child from the family by social behaviour training in a child-parent interaction and by work on the improvement in the family and social conditions of the family.
• Reducing the level of deprivation of children placed in institutional care by continuous work with their families and by cooperation with other competent professionals.
• Enabling a safe and satisfactory contact between placed children and their parents or their extended family in assistance and cooperation of the broadest team of professionals.
• Work on the safe return of children to their own families in cooperation with children, families and other competent professionals.

HOW

Families with children can contact the workers of the STREP´s centres:

• By themselves on the basis of their own worries or doubts related to their child´s upbringing. If they feel that there is a risk of their child being removed from them. If they want to be in contact with their placed child. If they seek their child´s return home from institutional care.
• On the basis of a recommendation of a social worker of social-legal protection of children.
• On the basis of a recommendation of a custodial judge.
• On the basis of a recommendation of an institutional care worker.
• On the basis of a recommendation of a gynaecologist, pediatrician, teacher, psychologist, etc.
• On the basis of a recommendation of other professionals.
• Etc.

The STREP´s counselling workers work with families and children largely in their natural family environment. If a child has been already taken away from the family, they contact the child on the basis of cooperation with the particular institutional care facility to which the court granted custody of the child. Their service is terrain. At least 70% of it is carried out in families, institutional care facilities, etc.

The project Social Activation Services For Families With Children is a continuity of the STREP´s oldest projects (Let´s Give Chance a Chance, Accompanying Families - an Alternative to Removing Children from Home) that were a response to the absence of programmes for socially endangered families with children as a tool of prevention of removing children from their families and placing them in institutional care and as a tool of improving families´ conditions to such an extent that the save return of the child is secured. These two projects had been realized before this type of services was incorporated in the law as a social service - "Social Activation Services for Families with Children".