May I take this opportunity to introduce you to the Link-Hope Foundation (LHF). LHF is a registered charity in England and I am the Scottish arm of it. We are a small but enthusiatic group. The two main professional social workers involved are myself, who works in Dundee, and John Parkin, who works in Derbyshire.We have a management committee and are all volunteers.
We work in partnership with Fundacja Rodzina Nadziei(FRN) in Gdansk, although our network of contacts now stretches across Poland. FRN is a Non-Government Organisation (NGO)running children's homes in Gdansk. With the help (financial and professional) of LHF, FRN has established one of the first projects in Poland to recruit and train foster carers. The vast bulk of children in care in Poland live in institutions. Those with whom we work know that if children have to live away from home, then doing so in a family is better than in an institution.
As well as consolidating the fostering project, which is expanding across Poland, we are working with FRN and other organisations, to try and establish as system for child protection. In Poland, as elsewhere, a significant number of children are abused and neglected. In Poland there is no structured system for dealing with this. There are a number of dedicated and enthusiastic professionals who wish to do something to help children and their families, but do not have the knowledge or resources. That's where we come in. My own professional speciality is child protection. Members of our committee continually dream up new ways of trying to raise money. We have been able to give financial support to FRN to set up their office to support the fostering project and train the foster carers.
Our next visit to Gdansk is in April 1999, when we will be working with our colleagues to promote the establishment of a network of organisations and agencies who will work together to address the problems of child abuse and neglect.
We organised and took part in a major conference on Child Protection in Sopot in September 1998. John Parkin, myself, a Police Inspector, a Consultant Paediatrician and a specialist worker from NSPCC, all from the UK, spoke and led workshops at the conference. In January 1999, John Parkin spoke at a conference just outside Warsaw which was attended by 500 delegates, including Government Ministers from the Department of Education.
We are always on the look out for people who wish to help. We are very keen to hear from anyone with professional skills in child care, people who may be interested in translating documents from English into Polish (we have translated the main English training programme for foster carers into Polish and have copyright on the Polish version), or even people with word processing skills or e-mails, people who are great fund-raisers, or whoare willing to help in any way.
If you would like to find out more about Link-Hope and the work we are doing in Poland, please send me an e-mail.
Donald MacKenzie
Glenfarg
Perthshire
donald.j.mackenzie@btinternet.com
Thank you for reading this message.
Posted on Jan 23, 1999, 4:38 PM from IP address 62.172.63.186