On the 25 th of August, Jonathan Scheele, Head of the European Commission Delegation in Romania, visited the FRCCF Community Centre from Cîmpia Turzii. For two days, Mr. Scheele held meetings with officials from Cluj and visited EU-financed projects.

The Community Centre from C î mpia Turzii was set up through a Phare Access 2000 programme as part of the project “Setting Up a Community Centre Network to Prevent Abandonment”. The Phare project was run between September 2002 and November 2003, but the centre continued to work after that. At present, it provides help to more than 220 disadvantaged children from C î mpia Turzii. A few days after Jonathan Scheele's visit, FRCCF received a 100,000-Euro Phare grant for a school abandonment project, which will be run in the FRCCF centres.

Mr. Scheele was very interested in how the project improves the lives of the underprivileged families from Cîmpia Turzii: abandonment prevention, literacy courses for children and their relatives, raising the school results of children with learning difficulties, and improving the child-parent relationship within disadvantaged families.

The FRCCF executive director, Mihai-Florin Rosca, and the Community Centre coordinator, Floriana Prahoveanu, talked to Jonathan Scheele and showed him around the centre, where about 50 children were taking part in tutoring, plastic arts, choir activities and psychological counselling.

The Cimpia Turzii community centre project continued to run after the end of the Phare funding in 2003. In Cîmpia Turzii, the partnership agreement with the town hall was renewed for another three years and the Cluj County Council offered free facilities, managed by the Cluj County Social Work and Child Protection Department, where an individual counselling room and a tutoring and spare time activity room were set up.