Activities for Disadvantaged Children in Foster Care Homes

In Miercurea Ciuc there are numerous foster care homes where kids with unstable emotional backgrounds, emotional difficulties, and attachment issues live, who are often left behind in their studies and don’t have proper social skills/life skills. The local Child Protection system gives them all the support they can, but it is very hard for the carers to cater to all the above in order to help the kids.
Volunteers help mentor and facilitate various non-formal and informal learning activities for these disadvantaged children 6 to 17 years old in 5 different Children's Homes. These houses are the following: Swiss House, Yellow House, Tudor Apartment, Kalász Apartment, Train Station Apartment. Each day of the week they go into a different house. In a house there are 6-11 kids on average, volunteers work 1-2 hours with usually 1 kid (sometimes 2-3), or with the whole group. The children living in the houses need help and mentoring in several areas of their life such as homework, social competences, different skills, etc. They also have outdoor activities with the kids such as going to concerts, taking them from/to school, afternoon programs, etc.
The volunteers need to collaborate on a daily basis so that they can implement the activities successfully. These activities require a lot of teamwork and cooperation. They need to collectively plan and implement their activities. Throughout the course of the volunteering activity, volunteers prepare, evaluate, do data registry, give feedback and reports about their activities. Through non-formal education and fun activities, volunteers reinforce the English that has been learned earlier in the day at school. The activities with the kids are in the afternoon between 2 and 6 pm so that the volunteers have time in the morning to come to our office for weekly discussions, language classes, to research, plan, and prepare the activities, evaluate learning outcomes.

Other tasks of the volunteers include meeting with their mentors weekly, weekly self-assessment for Youthpass, writing a journal, writing blog posts about their experiences, disseminating the activities on different social media platforms, participating in online trainings, partaking in bi-weekly accommodation meetings, participating in team buildings with Care2Travel staff and contributing to the visibility and dissemination of the activity. Additionally, they can partake in optional sub-activities such as Quiz Nights, Boardgame Nights, Language Clubs, etc.
The most essential sub-activity from these is the meetings with the kids. These meetings are crucial for the kids as it enables them to have more social interactions with people outside the school and their comfort zones as well as develop their foreign language skills. Next to this, they will be creating a booklet where they’ll document the most
successful methods and activities used throughout their activity. The main focus of this activity will be on the topic of the "environment". This project will have special activities related to greening which translates to the volunteers' additional focus on environmental issues by improving the local community. Activities include planting
trees/flowers, communal rubbish collecting events, etc.
Volunteers will also be responsible for recruiting volunteers at local schools. This activity had a major success in our previous project. Volunteers will visit various local schools with one of our staff members to talk about their volunteer experiences, promote local volunteering as well as ESC volunteering, and thereby disseminate, create awareness, and bring together locals. By doing this and having more volunteers we can also broaden our expertise thus making it possible to broaden and improve our existing activities. This would mean going into more children's homes in the future.