FICE International Annual report 2021
Dear FICE Members and supporters, dear readers of FICE Annual report 2021 whoever you are,
We are both happy and even proud to present to you this Annual report for 2021. It reflects the work of FICE members in 20 countries and in five continents. While reading the reports of our National Sections in those countries one can learn
about the vitality and dynamism of our members and their great efforts to continue to supply quality services for children and their families who need out-of-home care or other kinds of alternative care, even during this world pandemic.
We all know that 2021 was a most challenging time to everybody, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while individual citizens cope with it regarding their own families, FICE members all over the world struggled with the noble
humanitarian goal of maintaining quality services to children and families from the most vulnerable populations. The maintaining of out-of-home care services to children and young people in these times was extremely challenging for the staff, and you can find references to it in the reports of the different National Sections.
The creativity of educators all over the world to use online techniques while face-to-face meetings were not possible, is quite remarkable. Similarly, all FICE International activities were unfortunately moved to online meetings since the beginning of the pandemic. During 2021, we continued to hold three online "FICE LIVE FORUM" meetings, and six small scale and more intimate meetings under the title of "FICE COVID CAFÉ". We also succeeded to continue the working groups activities that were decided in our last General Assembly in Israel in 2019. More specifically, we succeeded to achieve a very large participatory process geared towards elaborating a new structural change of the FICE leading body, that would be finalized and voted upon in an online meeting on May 17th, 2022.
The different National reports reveal that Online activities were used by all National Sections for organizing seminars, conferences, business meetings and formal general assemblies.
This pandemic, that forced many of us to stay at home more often than usually, gave birth to numerous publishing activities. The materials from FICE International Congress held in Tel Aviv on October 2019 gave birth to four
different publications initiated by FICE Editorial Board chaired by Emmanuel Grupper with the close collaboration of various members of the Board. Two special issues in the open access electronic Journal of the University of Victoria in
Canada – International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (IJCYFS). One special issue in the open access electronic Journal of CYC-Net – CYC-ONLINE, and one book published in Israel in the Hebrew language. However, more
publications were issued this year by FICE members with specific knowledge about the way educators from different countries coped with the COVID-19 pandemic in residential care: one done in Brazil, in the UK, in Israel, South Africa
and others. FICE Austria completed this year a substantial contribution to the residential field by issuing a book about Quality Standards for out-of-home care, published originally in German and later translated to English.
You can find in these reports the importance given by FICE members all over to care leavers and to implementation of Children's rights and especially the concept of youth participation.
Some countries went in 2021 through different kinds of catastrophes and FICE members were called to help. In Kenya there were serious water floods, in Croatia a powerful Earthquake destroyed completely the village Sisak including a
children's home Vbina. Recently, in the first half of 2022, we have been living during the situation of war in Ukraine where children and young people are going through tragic events, and FICE members try to provide the support that is
needed, as much as we can, to our Ukrainians FICE members.
Dear readers, dear friends, we leave to you to discover by yourselves these rich and detailed reports of our FICE National sections and would welcome any feedback, remark, or concern.
Sincerely yours,
Prof. Emmanuel Grupper, Israel Rolf Widmer, Switzerland
FICE International co-presidents