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Interview with Tudor Radeanu, Head of Ungheni Social Assistance and Family Protection Department

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Ungheni region can be a good example for other regions of the Republic of Moldova, in the implementation of the Foster Care Service (FC) and not only. Can you tell us more about the history this service?

Thank you for your appreciation, but I must mention here the contribution of Partnerships for Every Child (P4EC) – they play a great role in the achievements of child and family welfare in Ungheni region. We were inspired by the professionalism and devotion of their cause. We closed two residential schools – Auxiliary school in Sculeni and Residential school in Ungheni – with over 150 children. At the same time we created the Family support service, FC service, and we believe this is the best way to protect children in the existing conditions of the Republic of Moldova. This form is largely used in European countries, and I hope that this type of service will continue to expand in our country, including in the regions that have not had opportunity to participate in P4EC’s projects yet. Currently, 67 children are placed into 40 fostering families. Basically we have reached the limit that we can call necessary average point in the number of foster carers, to cope with the problems and constraints in this area.

Still, how did you manage to achieve such results?

I am an idealistic practitioner. I read a lot about children, family. I memorized a phrase said by a famous writer: “There is nothing more expensive in life than a tear of a child – nor war, no historical even – nothing!” I keep in my memory the image of suffering, tears, sad looks of children from residential schools… I came to the conclusion that there is only one way: every child should live in a family, every child should feel that he or she is a personality, and his needs should be approached individually.

What other social services for children and families are developed at the regional level?

We have a maternal placement centre for mother-and-baby couples in Ungheni, also launched with the support of P4EC, that has the purpose to prevent child-family separation. It is possible that in the near future we will create other child and family protection services, including an informational centre. Services are not created for life, they need to be created and maintained as long as there is need for them. Then they should be modelled, according to the situation and the context of the existing problems. Another social service is Family Support that interacts at any moment with FC, or works in parallel with it. We work very much to prevent the child’s separation from family, and we intervene in emergency situations, when there is high risk for the children to enter the residential care system. This is why, this service is very important, and we hope that in the future our regional policies will be focused on children and families, and we will be allocating more resources for the development of this service. I mean both financial and human resources. We will extend the coverage area of this service, we will focus on earlier age, on the first years of life. We will insistently work in this direction, building work capacities of the multi-disciplinary teams – and we consider them very important in this context – so that all actors working in child protection develop a shared understanding of problems and solutions. Obviously, there is much work to do, and it is also necessary to train specialists from other areas: police, medicine, who play a very important role in the assurance of welfare of children in difficulty. But we should remember the most important: the family, strengthening family skills and collaboration with the family. We often neglect the family and do not involve it in the solution of their own problems, while we solve problems instead of them. We plan to have a better focus on this component in the future. We intend to create parenting capacity building centres. We will focus on prevention, involving community actors. The mass media plays an essential role here, and it should come up with methods promoting positive practices, good families, success stories that could be followed by other families who cannot cope on their own.

How do you manage to convince decision-makers allocate funds so that you can develop and maintain these social services for children and families?

We found necessary arguments to convince decision-makers that the needs and the problems of the family and the child are important for a good governance.

We know that you are implementing several international projects currently. What kind of projects are these, what is their focus?

It is impossible to implement reforms in social welfare, relying only on the allocated budgets. We focus specifically on drawing funds from other countries. We had a series of projects in capacity building of specialists involved in child and family protection. These are regional projects preventing school drop-out in Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova, involving specialists from various areas of activity – teachers, police officers, social assistants. We had good possibilities to take over positive practices in services, thinking, behaviour. We also participated in various trainings, round-table discussions on the prevention of child labour exploitation. Another very interesting project focused on the child and justice. Our stakeholders are the Ministry of Internal Affairs, judges, prosecution officers in the Republic of Moldova and Romania.

We have talked about achievements, but you probably had failures as well. Can you talk about this?

Yes, we do have failures, and we cannot talk only about successes. We had cases when we had to take children out of the foster family, because we had suspicions that they were labour exploited there. We admit that labour education is very good, but there should be a very clear limit between exploitation and labour education. We are, however, financially limited. We also need a good training. We could have our specialists trained to this level only due to the support of P4EC. Further on we need to understand that community social assistants need to be continuously trained and strengthened. We should have specialized programs for young people, because we need to support them until they are able to live on their own. We also have risks related to political instability, staff turnover caused by low salaries.

What does a success story mean to you?

A virtual idea implemented in practice, where welfare persists, where there are smiles, good understanding, love, care, positive connection with people around you, love of your country, family, team work, professionalism…