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Summary: 'Empower communities to support families’ is the message that World Vision Georgia is sending through its new project, ‘Sustaining Communities for Child Welfare'(SCCW).
Empower communities to support families’ is the message that World Vision Georgia is sending through its new project, ‘Sustaining Communities for Child Welfare (SCCW)’ Economic and social difficulties contribute to child abandonment and institutionalisation in Georgia, where more than 5,000 children are currently languishing in institutions, the majority of whom have parents. SCCW will help to spearhead the strategy of the Government-targeted programme through carefully implemented services upon which the Georgian Child Welfare Policy can be built. The project will be carried out first in the localities of Tianeti, Telavi, Akhmeta, Kutaisi and Zugdidi and the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. SCCW Project Manager Nutsi Odisharia says that the main objectives of the project are to create a framework and best practices for social worker assessments of all children entering and exiting institutions and alternative care. "We also want to establish internationally accepted norms for the classification of disabilities and appropriate Early Child Development and education standards for children with disabilities in Georgia,” she said. “The project aims to create a model system of citizen-oriented community support to help prevent child abandonment”, Odisharia added. In order to reach these objectives, the SCCW has created a timetable of activities from September 2005 to July 2006. Among these activities are the creation of assessment methodologies for children with disabilities; community resource building with the local citizens' Social Policy Working Groups to mobilise communities; and organisational analyses of institutions to be closed or transformed. Children in Especially Difficult Circumstances Programme Manager, Mary Ellen Chatwin, says that this project encourages an inter-sectoral network of organisations in order to promote the new government policies on child welfare. SCCW works through agencies that have all been key World Vision partners in the de-institutionalisation process over the past four or five years, including EveryChild, Child and Environment and The First Step.