CONCORDIA is an international, independent aid organization for children, adolescents and families, operating in Romania, Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova.

The services of our work with children include alternative care for children in family-like communities in all three project countries. Furthermore our services include social centers for adolescents in precarious life situations, supervised housing for adolescents/young adults, street work as well as a spectrum of educational activities such as learning aid, vocational training or music lessons. Our main goal is to prepare disadvantaged children and adolescents, often left behind by their parents, for a self-determined life. Over the last two decades, the former social project for street children in Bucharest evolved into an organization that offers relief to a total of 1,000 children as well as to families.

In addition, we look after and provide food for around 2,500 elderly people in social centers as well as soup kitchens on a daily basis in Moldova and strengthen families in distress by social offerings. In many cases it is crucial to strengthen the opportunities for action of the parents in order to achieve the realisation of children’s right to personality development. We contribute to the advancement of children’s and teenager’s developmental opportunities and chances of life by supporting parents, discussing with them parenting issues and by supporting them to develop perspectives for an independent life for them and their children. We thereby focus particularly on providing help to help themselves, by assisting them in the purchase of means of production and livestock and by offering advice to families in critical circumstances. Through our work with existing families we can occasionally avoid painful separations of the children from their families.

www.concordia.or.at

This is how we achieve change…

“In alternative care settings we achieve change due to stable attachment, resource-oriented support in relevant life fields as education, social participation and creativity (as music activities) and therapeutic services when needed. Finally the effort to develop our collective expertise in the fields of social, analytic and professional competencies is an important precondition for achieving sustainable benefits.

In our family-oriented services we aim to empower families and reduce household poverty and increase household incomes which has positive impacts on child level outcomes in education, health and nutrition.

We appreciate the research on third sector impact as we think that reflecting on and learning about new methods of measuring impact is important for every organization working with vulnerable individuals and groups from different perspectives (from the perspective of funders, target-groups and experts concerning the further development of methods and services).

Concerning our sphere of activities we notice a lack of evidence on the long term impact of different alternative care arrangements on the wellbeing of children not staying with their families of origin from a qualitative perspective. Caring institutions would profit from a broad research on impact assessment and indicators concerning long term impacts of different forms of alternative care.”