About Børn & Familier in English

Børn & Familier – forum for udvikling i socialt arbejde (Children & Families – Forum for Development in Social Work) is an umbrella-association, comprised of 4 independent, non-profit organisations or agencies. The majority of the organisations go way back in history, since they started out as voluntary organisations around 1890 with the sole aim of supervising the placement in of orphans and abandoned children in foster homes.

Børn & Familier is an organisation for professional actors, who work with vulnerable children, young people and their families. Børn & Familier work to strengthen professional and more holistic efforts in relation to the target groups as well as developing services and knowledge. We have the ambition to become the network for public and private organisations alike in the field.

Goals

Børn & Familier’s main goals are:

• to further professional and holistic solutions which will make a necessary difference in the lives of children and young people
• to unite social actors in a goal-orientated development of services and knowledge
• to act as a socio-professional and socio-political spokesman/mouthpiece in order to disseminate the member organisations experience and knowledge

The 4 professional organisations are placed throughout Denmark. Each of them offers a variety of services both in the field of foster care and in other areas of services for vulnerable children and their families. They place children in foster care, they find and train the foster families and they offer them support in terms of networking and visits. Part of the service is talking to the children placed in foster care. They supervise the foster placements and make reports to the local authorities. Apart from that, they offer services like assessments of families for the local authorities, they do family work, and they create network-groups for foster children, professional foster families, kinship-families and parents of children in foster care. A growing area of expertise is supervised visits between children and parents, both for children in foster care and for children in divorced families.

Tasks
Børn & Familier, as the umbrella for the 4 organisations, have several tasks:
a) we provide services to the 4 organisations in their work.
b) we represent the 4 organisations in committees and formal/informal settings, where vulnerable children and children in foster care are debated and we do conferences and make books
c) we work on increasing the level of understanding in society of the need for better quality in foster care and related areas. We are in contact with politicians, organisations and authorities – and render our opinion in the lawmaking process.

Projects
We have a website for children in foster care www.boernetinget.dk with a “Letters to…” , where three adult, former foster children answer questions.  The website is a very exciting new way to generate knowledge about the feelings, lives and experiences of foster children – and we are trying to find out how best to channel that knowledge into working with foster children. Over the next couple of years we intend to produce a leaflet and a film directed towards foster children, so as to inform them about what it means to be in foster care.

Another project we are currently working is a project with the purpose of recruiting foster families from ethnic minorities.

A third current research and knowledge gathering project is about documentation and ensuring quality in foster homes as an area placement of children. A specific focus in this project is to avoid breakdown in the placement and to improve the schooling.

Børn & Familier is a part of NOFCA (Nordic Foster Care Association) and a member of IFCO (International Foster Care Organisation).

If you want to know more, you can contact us at our office, which is comprised by a Development- and administrative- executive, a Knowledge developer, with responsibility for the Documentation project, a Project worker with responsibility for Børnetinget and a Student assistant.

Gitte Kirkeby, Development- and administrative- executive
March 2009

Telephone number: 0045 33258806

email: gk@boernogfamilier.dk

Website: www.boernogfamilier.dk