A Family for Every Child
It was a conversation today about charity mergers which prompted a memory.
12 years ago on Valentines Day, our founder Terry Hallman stepped of a train in Kyiv to make his way to the offices of EveryChild who were resident in the building of the Department of Family Youth and Sport. I’d arranged the meeting through their office in London.
He was there to describe outline plans for ramping up the scale of transitioning children from institutional care to family homes, by applying business for social purpose.
It was only a few weeks later that we stumbled on the story of Torez. With his ‘Death Camps, for Children’ series, Terry spoke out about the extent of corruption and sketched out a plan for national scale innovation.
Ukraine’s minister for Family Youth and Sport was interviewed later that year. He announced that “the US Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador William Taylor, the working group on pressing issues related to the adoption has been formed”
He was asked “Some charitable NGOs were shocked by horrible conditions our orphans live. These orphanages were called even “death camps.” Do you know about those facts? How many times the Youth, Sport and Family Ministry has held reviews of the orphanages?”
The ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine followed and was delivered to Ukraine’s government in February 2007. Terry died in August 2011, when Maidan leaders acknowledged his commitment.
When the opportunity arose in 2012, one of my submissions to the Long Term Capitalism initiative was ‘Every Child Deserves a Loving Family’. The title derived from what the ‘Marshall Plan’ had argued.
“Care for children in new family type homes will be about the same is in existing orphanages. New homes are a one-time cost — a cost insignificant in comparison with giving each child a family type of home environment.
“There is no substitute for a loving family environment for growing children. Existing state care institutions do not and cannot possibly provide this — despite occasional, lingering claims that state care is the best care for children. This attitude is a holdover from Soviet times when the state was idealized as the best possible caretaker for all, including children. Stark reality does not support that notion.”
Everychild had embraced the theme and took a petition to the House of Commons
In 2015 Javid Khan of Barnados took up the same theme in Huffington Post, “Every Child Deserves a Loving Family”
Until today, I’d overlooked the role of William Taylor. Terry had known him from earlier work in Siberia and when he wrote in 2008 to USAID, Taylor was one of those included for circulation.
The Marshall Plan for Ukraine was introduced to the EU in December 2008.
It’s taken until today for me to realise that Everychild ceased fundraising in 2014 and seems to have been replaced by a group known as Family for Every Child. There are some 30+ partners.
ITN Journalist Chris Rogers had been a leading figure in raising awareness of these issue in Eastern Europe. In our 2006 conversation he revealed that they were trying to get JK Rowling on board. Rowling went on to form the charity Lumos who say:
“Ukraine has more than 50,000 children living in institutions. Progress has been made in recent years, but as yet there is no National Plan for reform. Lumos is beginning work with other NGOs and regional authorities to demonstrate complete system change in one region as a model for national reform.”
As I describe above, my colleague and friend died trying to gain support for such a national plan. Without reforming the underlying social and economic conditions transitioning children from orphanages into loving family homes would be an endless process.
“Repair and relief in any one area, such as childcare reform — a horrific mess — could only happen by dealing with the entire social, economic and political system as a whole. Dealing only with the various discrete elements would not work. There had to be a wide-scale reformation of the whole system in order to fix any one part of it.”
“There remain approximately 90,000 children in orphanages, 10,000 in the ‘gulags’. Another 200,000 children live on the streets because state-care options have been less tolerable than street life. Because street children are most visible and therefore obvious, other organizations notice them and are making at least token efforts to help them. Nevertheless, the overall problems are systemic. It is not enough to help these kids without dealing with the causes — primarily corruption and displacement of Ukraine’s cash and resources — that put children in such conditions to begin with. “
