In Europe, the majority of unaccompanied children are placed in institutional reception facilities. The Reception and Living in Families (RLF) project that Nidos and their partners carried out in 2013-2015 revealed that this mostly occurs for practical reasons where youth care and asylum/migration systems mismatch. There is insufficient knowledge on how to increase the quality and quantity of family care for this target group. Good practices do not reach beyond the local level where they are developed. And financial and organisational structures do not explicitly support the development of alternative family care.
All countries that provide RLF have reported a need for training material specifically developed for social workers, reception professionals or – sometimes – guardians who are responsible for counseling host families that take care of unaccompanied children. These professionals are in need of tools and specialised training on how to work with this group of children and their host families. Working with these children does not only mean dealing with different backgrounds and different languages, but also concerns issues like the effects of living in between cultures and coping with trauma or loss. Preparing host families on these themes can improve the care provided and decrease the risk of breakdowns.
Within the ALFACA-project, Nidos (the Netherlands) in cooperation with Minor-Ndako (Belgium), Jugendhilfe Süd-Niedersachsen (Germany), OPU (Czech Republic), the Danish Red Cross and KIJA (Austria) developed training for professionals working with host families that take care of unaccompanied children.
The training consists of e-learning and a manual that provide participants with general knowledge on working with this target group and knowledge on recruitment, screening, matching and guidance of the host families. Both the training and the manual, as well as additional information and tools, can be found on this website.
The project implementation period was 1 October 2015 to 1 April 2017 and the project was co-funded by the European Commission.
The goal of the project was to further develop and improve the reception of unaccompanied children in families by providing professionals with the tools needed for this and teaching them how to use these tools. A train-the-trainer session for professionals from member states was held in the Netherlands on 28-30 November 2016.
Please contact Liedewij de Ruijter de Wildt by email for more information: l.deruijterdewildt@nidos.nl.