What has Focus on Romania achieved in the area of institutional care in Romania?

FOR set out to change the Romanian government's mind about the tens of thousands of young adults in state care. We wanted to propose a solution to this crisis that would provide hope of a better life to these innocent victims, and we lobbied hard at international level in an attempt to get the reform process started.  In 2002 we proposed the closure of the notorious Negru Voda institution in Romania's Constanta region, and its replacement by a state of the art care centre for the severely disabled as well as protected family-type homes in the community for those who were assessed as being capable of semi-independent living.  We proposed that this closure and the provision of alternatives to institutional care would be used as a pilot project for the eventual reform of all such places in Romania.

To date, we have succeeded in having this proposal adopted by the government as the basis for their reform policy, and we also managed to persuade them to appoint a project manager at government level to oversee the reform process. This project manager and his team are in place, and have succeeded in advancing the planning for this process to a point where now only the lack of resources is causing delays in reforms.  The care centre is partly built, the first protected home and all the relevant management and training structures are now complete, and three further homes are in the course of construction. The protected homes are now recognised in government circles as an important part of the reform process, and the model of care which will be provided by these first four homes and the associated training and management structures will also be used in the future for the care of the elderly in the community. If the Romanian government had lived up to its funding commitments, the overall project would have been completed by August 2005, but sadly the government funding dried up in April 2005 when the European Parliament voted in favour of Romania's access to the union.  Having achieved the objective of EU accession, the Romanian government can again ignore the issue of human rights reform, and nobody can do anything about it, except the European Parliament.

All that is needed to solve this problem is for the European Parliament to make the completion of the pilot project and its rapid rollout nationally a target for Romania's progress towards full accession. Romania has been voted into the EU with no preconditions relating to this reform process, but the matter comes up for review in November 2005. It is essential that the depth of feeling of all right-thinking people is communicated to the decision makers ahead of the November date. Let them know that you are not happy with their deliberate ignoring of this basic human rights issue- SEE PHOTO - take part in our One Million E-mails Campaign, and get all your friends to do likewise. If you don't get a response, send another e-mail! Don't let our uncaring politicians off the hook on this issue -- keep harassing them until they do something. The future can be bright, if enough people get behind this campaign.
This house represents the future, and it can be done if we all make it happen.

This is the first of the new protected homes in the community being built as a joint venture by FOR and its partners and Constanta County Council, and the second such home is being built next door. Both of these houses will be complete by October 2005, and these will then be staffed and owned by the County Council.  The first 16 lucky people (8 per house) from the Negru Voda orphanage will move here in October, and they are already undergoing a normalisation programme that is being run by the Aurelia Trust, an Irish NGO with extensive experience in the area of social policy reform.  We are also involved in another joint venture with the County Council to construct a further two homes in a neighbouring town, and these will also be ready in October 2005.

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