Together for Children Day-Care Centres

The Social Protection Service of the Cluj-Napoca Local Council benefits from EU funding through 2004-2006 Phare programme – Economic and Social Cohesion / Social Services Component – of 166,610 EUR. The financed project, Together for Children Day-Care Centres , run in partnership with the Romanian Foundation for Children, Community and Family, started on the 22 nd of January 2007 and will end after 18 months.

The overall project goal is to provide specialised social care to socially and economically disadvantaged families from the town of Cluj-Napoca . It also aims at strengthening the partnership between public institutions and NGO's by granting social services to shared beneficiaries.

The project activities are carried out at the community centres of the Romanian Foundation for Children, Community and Family , operating as day-care centres: the “EveryChild” Community Centre located at No 4 Ilie Macelaru Street; the Community Centre located at No 33 Dumbrava Rosie Street. The centres use multi-disciplinary teams made of: centre coordinator, social workers (3 for each centre), psychologist, educational psychologist, legal adviser, general practitioner, primary school teacher, tutors and administrative staff. The beneficiaries of these services are either guided to the centres by the Social Protection Service of Cluj-Napoca Local Council or they contact FRCCF on their own.

The project targets a number of 300 families living in poverty and having lots of children. Up to now, 88 families have already been selected and the project practitioners have already drafted service plans for them based on social care, legal, psychological, medical and job counselling and work mediation. From the beginning of the project, each month, over 100 children accessed the community centre services, benefiting from different kinds of counselling (psychological, medical, school and educational), from socialization and personal development sessions as well as other educational programmes. Moreover, the children receive a daily snack, and those who live far from the community centres – bus tickets. In order to ease up children's access, the centres are now open 6 days a week, Monday to Saturday.

For the next period, the project partners intend to set up a joint database with all social service providers from Cluj and their beneficiaries. It has been noticed that the social cases of this project can be solved only with the help of other institutions assisting disadvantaged families. Through a joint database, the Social Protection Service will be able to swiftly offer the entire range of services available in town to underprivileged families and to monitor more efficiently the way in which they are delivered.

The total budget of Together for Children Day-Care Centres project is of 212,227 EUR. 78.51% of this amount is EU funding, while the rest of 14.2% (30,137 EUR) will be covered by the Cluj-Napoca Local Council and 7.29% (15,480 EUR) by the Romanian Foundation for Children, Community and Family.