Order Christmas Cards: http://www.felicitaridininima.ro/

We made an online Christmas Cards shop: http://www.felicitaridininima.ro/ If you are about to order Chritsmas cards, buy some from us. The cards can be personalised with the logo and the text of the company, in any quantity, on digital, high quality print. The money raised from the sales are to be used in our prevention of abandonment programme, and the buyers will be informed about what we do with the money (how many children and families benefit from the funds and in what way). So, we want it to be a transparent project. The target set is 100,000 cards sold by Christmas.

Spread this to your network and help children stay with their families!

The Carers of Disabled People Are Not Paid

In most situat people with disabilities are dependent on their carers. Parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts or grandparents - they look after them all day long. Many of those with disabilities are 100% dependent on their personal assistant, usually someone in their family, to give them the medication, to protect them, to keep an eye on them. In an overwhelming proportion, they need help even to be fed, to go to the restroom, or to simply take a walk. either physically or psychologically affected, they are in the hands of their carers, who dedicate their life for this cause. I do not know how many of us could do this. And I do not want to think how lucky we are to have healthy children, siblings, or simply surrounded by people who are capable to look after themselves on their own.

The carers disabled people  have all the rights in the world to protest: they have not received their small salaries for six months. And remember: they are people who cannot have another job, nor can they have another source of income. And on their small salary it is not only themselves who rely, but also the disabled person they look after.

I wonder when are we going to live in a normal country, where the necessary minimum needed for survival is ensured, and where people would live in dignity?

Felicitaridininima.ro

We have a lot of talented children in the family homes and in foster care. That is why we organised a Christmas cards competition, among the children we work with. Of these Christmas cards, we chose ten, and the decision was not an easy one. I saw many wonderful cards the children draw. The ten cards we selected are to be placed on the online Christmas cards shop we are building right now. With the money from sales, we will help children and families stay together, as part of our prevention programme. We plan to sell 100,000 cards by Christmas. Starting next week (November 22), you can access www.felicitaridininima.ro to see and buy them. Your Christma card will be more than a simple act, as you are also helping vulnerable children and their families.

Together for Children

And still, children can bring people together. Journalists from a diversity of media areas participated in a field visit to Bacau, one of the counties we work in, with thousands and thousands children and families benefiting from our support programmes: Cristina Moldovan (Evenimentul Zilei), Simona Tache (bloger), Diana Marcu (Gandul), Nic Sarbu (Catavencii) and Andreea Vasile (Feder.ro), accompanied by Petrut Calinescu (photojournalist) met parents with the most difficult circumstances, children with most complicated childhoods. With them, there were my colleagues, Ioana Hodoiu, Radu Tohatan and Gheorghe Lar. They saw the institution we are closing with the Bacau Social Services and SERA Romania, where there are still a few tens of children with severe special needs. The others were already taken back to their families, or to other families, or to family homes. The journalists were welcomed in the households of parents we supported so that they could stay with their children. They saw houses of parents who left their kids in institutions, but then they could bring them back to them, with a little bit of help. They visited foster carers and the children they look after.

What I think they could also see is the spell parents" love sheds upon children. I think the miracle of childhood is closely tied to the parents" love. When they are loved, children have a spark on their faces, their eyes lit up and they face challenges in a totally different way. And I think they could also understand, once again, how beyond any hardships and poverty, the children are wealthy when their parents are with them. The rest is irrelevant.

Social Benefits and the Growth of Employment Rate

It is good that the state gives money for needy families. It is not so good that the money is granted unconditionally, without thinking and without any differentiation. Working directly with social cases, with poor parents and vulnerable children, I can see how important social benefits are. But I can also see how these benefits, granted on the basis of general criteria, related only to the amount of income per family and on the number of children in a family - lead to the parents" lack of motivation for employment. In many situations, we find companies which need employees. We also have the people who could be employed. However, when these people balance the income they receive unconditionally from the state with the hours of labour at work, they choose not to work. The prevention of child separation from their parents should be correlated with the employment of needy parents. Of course, they need financial support from the state, until there is a job available. Once there is a job (and this is usually in the responsibility of social workers) the financial support should be stopped, as the employment provides the minimum income needed by the family. Moreover, the financial allowance should be correlated with the individual person, so that, in case the mother is still unemployed, she should receive ongoing financial support from the state, until the time when she is also on a paid job.

Social benefits need a new architecture, one which should encourage the employment of parents, so that the amounts spent in vain by the state would get a certain logic: they could be directed towards the employment of those who do not have a job. In addition to the reduction of the number of unemployed people, there would also happen something natural for any society based on the added value brought by labour: people would actually work, and their children could see the example of parents working hard for the bread they bring on the table, not obtaining it for free, from one day to the next.