“It’s important to meet other people working within the same areas and learn from each other” she said.

 

Gertrude Reuter-Lessing travelled from Berlin to meet 25 colleagues from 14 organisations in eight countries. Just like all participants at the workshop, she is working for an organisation funded partly by World Childhood Foundation. During two days in the end of April they gathered in the outskirts of Stockholm to exchange experiences and gain new connections.

 

– This is the first time we draw together so many projects at the same time. We hope that you all will get many new ideas, views and inspiration from each other, Childhood´s Secretary General Gunilla von Arbin said addressing the participants.

 

The workshop was part of an extensive evaluation of all Childhood-supported projects working with young mothers and their babies, which is one of Childhood’s six target groups. Focus lies on identifying successful methods with the ultimate goal of supporting replications in other locations.

 

The organisations were asked to present working methods they found particularly effective in empowering young mothers.

 

Video home-training was brought up by the German organisation Mother Child House Bethanien as well as by Chances for Children working in New York. Chances for Children is a project located on-site in high school nurseries where teenage mothers attend classes. They use video sessions as a tool when working with the relation between the mother and the child.

 

– We ask the mother to play with her baby as she might play at home, and then put on the video camera for ten minutes. Afterwards we watch the unedited tape together and give the mother strength-based feedback, said Elizabeth Buckner at Chances for Children.

 

She explained how the results from one video session can be worth more than a hundred therapy sessions as the mother clearly can see how the baby responds to her actions. Comparing recordings also makes it evident how the interaction changes over time.

 

At the Mother Child House Bethanien in Germany, the video home-training was made possible by funding from World Childhood Foundation. Out of the 14 young single mothers living in their house, nine are doing video training.

 

– We focus on what the mother is already doing that is successful. The tapes are edited to highlight the good moments since we want to work from a strength-based perspective, said Karin Janssen at Mother Child House Bethanien.

 

Young mothers who are HIV-positive are a particularly vulnerable group, where the child abandonment rate is high. In 2005, Doctors of the world in Russia started a project in cooperation with Childhood to prevent HIV-positive mothers from abandoning their children. Their MAMA+ programme has proven to be very successful and has since been replicated in Ukraine, a country facing one of the fastest growing HIV-epidemics in the world.

 

– In Ukraine, the number of HIV-positive mothers grows by 20 percent every year. We have established a referral network with maternity hospitals, AIDS Centres and local organisations to be able to identify mothers at risk, explained Anna Shapoval at MAMA+ Ukraine.

 

Since the start in 2006, 98 percent of the babies included in the project have been able to stay in their biological families. The Russian MAMA+ has been equally successful.

 

During the workshop, a number of other effective methods were discussed along with examples of how the 14 organisations who participated work with evaluations, authorities and funding. Many phone numbers and email-addresses were exchanged between participants wanting to keep in touch.

 

Anna De Geer, project manager at Childhood, emphasizes the importance of networking between organisations working within the same areas.

 

– We are doing the evaluation of all our mother-baby projects to find out whether Childhood are having an impact; if we support organisations and projects that show results. At the same time, we want our partners to be involved in the process. We want to help them improve, to learn from each other and from their mistakes, she says.

 

The evaluation is carried out by an external organisation, specializing in evaluations and a report will be presented in the beginning of June.

 

– We already evaluated all our girl projects, and we intend to go through all our target groups, one by one, Anna De Geer says.

 

Author: Maja Svenonius

Photo above: Representatives from 14 organisations in eight countries met at the workshop. 

 

Chances for Children, USA

 

Every Child, Moldova

 

Every Child, Ukraine

 

 

Korzcak, Russia

 

 

Doctors of the world, Russia

www.dowusa.org