Supporting life after institutional care

The main aim is to contribute to locally develop effective social policies aimed to promote social inclusion of young people leaving child protection residential settings (such as institutions and community based services).
The operative objectives are:

• to offer policy-makers and social service providers evidence based on ad hoc transnational social experimentation to evaluate the possibility to introduce in their respective child protection systems the professional figure of the "social intermediary" able to support (before and after) young people leaving residential settings to approach the new challenging social context;
• the improvement of the quality of services for care leaving.

The treatment will basically consist of offering a complementary intermediation social service to the treatment group through social intermediaries to be identified and adequately trained. This social professional will generally offer: individual or group counselling and orienteering, one-to-one informal sessions with the beneficiary aimed to increase his/her specific life skills as well as his/her access to services, advocacy and intermediation service between the single beneficiary and different actors involved in his/her single case-management, bureaucratic support to the beneficiary as well as support in having access to cultural and leisure facilities or events.Object of the project will be the analysis of such treatment. The phases are the following:

• elaboration of a set of provisional rules and procedures that will govern the social experimentation;
• implementation of the social experimentation at local level;
• analysis of results and Mutual Learning;
• elaboration of final results/recommendations.

The results achieved are:

• a set of provisional rules and procedures for managing and developing this kind of social experimentation;
• comparative analysis of the "treatment-control service differential" in terms of: cost-benefit analysis of the program;possible diffusion in other EU contexts; probability of persisting effects of the program on treatment group members; sustainability of the program;
• dissemination of the transnational comparative analysis of the results achieved through the program experimentation.

The main available products are:

• final report on the research;
• updating of the website “child out”;
• newsletter to European stakeholders.