ESC: Activities for Children in Foster Care Homes 2.0

In Miercurea Ciuc, numerous foster care homes provide residence for children facing unstable emotional backgrounds, emotional difficulties, and attachment issues. These children often struggle academically and lack proper social and life skills. Although the local Child Protection system offers support, caregivers find it challenging to address all these needs effectively. Volunteers play a crucial role in mentoring and facilitating various non-formal and informal learning activities for children aged 6 to 17 residing in five different Children's Homes: Zsögöd House, Yellow House, Tudor Apartment, Kalász Apartment, and Train Station Apartment. Volunteers visit a different house each day of the week, spending 1-2 hours with typically one child (occasionally 2-3) or the entire group. The children require assistance and guidance in areas such as homework completion, social skills, and other competencies. Outdoor activities, such as attending concerts and providing transportation to and from school, are also organized. Collaboration among volunteers is essential for the successful implementation of these activities, which necessitate teamwork and cooperation. Volunteers engage in planning, implementing, evaluating, and documenting activities throughout their service. By incorporating non-formal education and enjoyable activities, volunteers reinforce English language skills acquired earlier in the day at school. Afternoon activities with the children occur between 3 and 7 pm, allowing volunteers time in the morning to attend office discussions, language classes, conduct research, plan activities, and assess learning outcomes.

Volunteer's tasks :

To learn with the kids, to plan, organize, and facilitate activities for children in foster care homes, with a focus on non-
formal and informal learning activities outside of school: the non-formal activities with children formal activities and their effect on children and create short posts on the social media pages. You’ll need to put together a collection of detailed games and non formal activities in a booklet that can be used in the future on the topic of healthy living.

Other tasks of the volunteers include weekly meetings with their mentors, weekly self-assessment for Youthpass, writing a journal, writing blog posts about their experiences, disseminating the activities on different social media platforms, participating in online trainings, partaking in bi-weekly accommodation meetings, participating in teambuilding with Care2Travel staff, and contributing to the visibility and dissemination of the activity. Additionally, they can partake in optional sub-activities such as Quiz Nights, Boardgame Nights, Language Clubs, etc. The most essential sub-activity from these is the meetings with the kids. These meetings are crucial for the kids as it enables them to have more social interactions with people outside the school and their comfort zones as well as develop their foreign language skills. Next to this, they will be creating a booklet where they’ll document the most successful methods and activities used throughout their activity. During our projects from 2024, we keep it important to introduce the kids into democratic life and we'll create activities where they can learn more about this topic. Volunteers will also be responsible for recruiting volunteers at local schools. This activity was a major success in our previous project. Volunteers will visit various local schools with one of our staff members to talk about their volunteer experiences, promote local volunteering as well as ESC volunteering, and thereby disseminate, create awareness, and bring together locals. By doing this and having more volunteers we can also broaden our expertise thus making it possible to broaden and improve our existing activities. This would mean going into more children's homes in the future.

Volunteers will work flexibly for 6-7 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Volunteers will get 2 days of holiday per month, accordingto ESC guidelines.