What does this social service do:
The Community Support Center provides a variety of services to children and families: psychological and social counseling, assistance and accompaniment to support children in coping with different problems in their development and communication and support to families in providing their children with good parental care.
The work of the Community Support Center is targeted at:
- Families at risk of placing their children in a specialized institution or families that are somehow in a crisis situation;
- Children in the community who were victims of physical or psychological violence and their families or children who do not get care from their parents;
- Children at risk of dropping out of school or children who have dropped out already and their families;
- Children with behavioral problems and their families;
- Children and adolescents placed in specialized institutions for children;
- Candidate foster families; approved foster families with children placed with them;
- Candidate adopters and adoption families in the period after adoption;
- Families in the community who seek advice and support with the upbringing of their children.
Services are delivered by a multidisciplinary team comprised of:
- Social workers;
- Psychologists;
- Specialists (pedagogues);
- Other specialists depending on the specific local needs of children and families.
The following services are provided in the Community Support Center:
- Psychological support and counseling for children:
- to restore and improve children’s relations with their families;
- to develop life skills;
- to cope with violence and challenging behavior and to improve relations with peers;
- Educational support to children who experience problems at school;
- Support to families, awareness raising and counseling for parents:
- to provide a safe and secure environment for the child, to improve their skills to take good care of the child, to prevent violence risks;
- to prepare and submit various documents to the local and central government authorities;
- to seek and find a job;
- to get healthcare services: to select a general practitioner, to get preventive medical check-ups, to help when hospital treatment is needed;
- to enable the use of other services the child needs.
How to get access to the services:
Children and parents can use the services of the Center
- by going to the Child Protection Department of the Social Assistance Directorate at the local municipality and obtaining a referral to the service they want; then they need to sign a contract with the service provider for the delivery of the requested service;
- by submitting an application to the service provider for a specific service and then signing a contract with the provider for the delivery of the requested service.
