Fundatia Inocenti

The mission of Inocenti Foundation (FI) is to advocate and support children in need by creating a better life for them and their families. Until two years ago the main target for FI services were abandoned children, wherever they were, in hospitals or in placement centers. In the last couple of years FI extended its programs to include children with disabilities. Our programs: 1„Child’s Life” Program - County Hospital Bistrita Presently FI Bistrita has two staff members who service between 12-20 children every day, some of them have been abandoned by their parents or will reside in the hospital for extended periods of time. The child life program which occupies two rooms in Bistrita operates similar to the Bucharest programs. 2. „Me and my Family” Program This Program focuses on children with disabilities. For this purpose, FI helps to support a program of DSS Bistrita Nasaud and SERA Foundation Romania for the successful transfer of 34 children with disabilities from Camin Spital Beclean (an old and bad institution) to their placement in foster care families as well as two family group homes and an apartment. The purpose of FI intervention was to prevent disruption during these placements due to the children’s huge developmental delays. FI helped the professional care givers to understand these children and make recommendations concerning their care. Other activities included behavioral remediation, occupational therapy, physical therapy and development of appropriate social skills. 3. Literacy program The Early Literacy program began in 2002 as a developmental and nurturing program for the children leaving the placement centers. The purpose of the program is to develop early literacy skills and to stimulate the developmental bond between the parent and the child. The program is run by volunteers for 1-3 hours per week in their families (bio or foster). In 2010 we started a new component „Read and Smile”. This is a set of actions designed to stimulate interest in reading to preschool children in rural areas through attractive activities / motivation and promoting the book as an important factor in education, information and social achievement. The main activities are the collection of books from pupils from urban schools and donating them to children in rural kindergartens at special events attended by parents, called "Reading Day". 4. „Early intervention for children with disabilities” The overall purpose of this project is to reduce the risk of maternal abandonment of the small disabled children and to increase the level of recovering neural – psycho and motor skills by facilitating their access to proper services. Additionally, we want to support the process of social integration of these children into the larger community and to offer support to their families. The main activities are: informing women, pregnant women, and young mothers about the risks associated with lifestyle choices that lead to deficiences in their children and what can be done to remediate these situations; identification as soon as possible of children with neural – psycho and motor disabilities; offering services and recovering therapies at children’s home; organizing support groups for the parents with disabled children and counseling them; promoting educational and socializing activities of disabled children, through a literacy program. 5. “Social and school integration for roma children” in Bistrita and Reteag This program started in May 2008 and through it we provide children with the material, social and economic support needed for them to attend school. We started with basic educational and informational activities for the children and their parents. We organize educational activities for children, adapted to their needs. Beginning in September 2011, we also offer an after-school program were we help children with their homework because most of the parents are semi-illiterate.