Creating Futures. Collaborative Quality Development of Child and Youth Homes in Hungary and Switzerl

Internationally, a significant number of young people with experiences of residential care do not succeed in creating sustainable futures for themselves:

-Switzerland: increased risk of exclusion, lower degree of educational and professional achievement, difficulties regarding housing and employment, increased risk of conflicts with the law, social isolation and, in young men, a high mortality rate of 10%. (Gabriel & Stohler, 2008; 2016)

-Hungary: 40% of care leavers get in conflict with the law and/or are unemployed and/or homeless and/or working in prostitution. (Burgund & Rácz, 2015)

In the project "Creating Futures", a community of practice of child and youth homes in Hungary and Switzerland is collaborating on finding innovative approaches for the homes to better support young people in taking life into their own hands, developing their own ideas of the future and realizing them actively and sustainably. The project involves young people, managers and staff of the participating homes.

Vision: Young people from child and youth homes have the same chances of creating sustainable futures for themselves as the general population.

A central pre-condition: Young people succeed already during their stay in child and youth homes to take their lives into their own hands, develop their own ideas of the future and of a «good life», and to realize these actively and sustainably (= self-empowerment)

Project goals:

1.Increased capacity of child and youth homes for promoting young people ’s self-empowerment.

… for example, by developing new and/or improved structures, processes, attitudes, approaches, methods …

2.Increased knowledge regarding how the expertise of young people and staff can be harnessed for development and innovation in child and youth homes.

For more information about the project, check this presentation, presented in the conference "Shaping high quality child and youth care", 5th April, Trogen, Switzerland.

The FICE members from 20+ countries present participated in discussing three important questions related to the project. Due to time constraints, we could only collect answers to one of them. We kindly ask you to provide your input by filling in the following questionnaire.

Here, you can find a short documentary about the Young Expert Exchange in Budapest last year https://drive.google.com/file/d/1radlXolFNqYClVkQKXYYw7bbvOE5X9Fd/view and here https://www.dropbox.com/s/itogashv6wy8r1c/Video%2028.07.17%2C%2013%2030%2011.mov?dl=0 a filmclip the young people produced with some of their results.