Amur Oblast hosted launch of a program for specialists working with families in distress
15 july 2021
Amur Oblast’s social workers specializing in helping families and children in distress took part in an educational program put together by Children's Villages SOS, an international charity. The program consisting of a series of webinars titled "The World Around You" was conducted with SIBUR’s support as part of its social investment program, the Formula for Good Deeds.
Being an educational program, "The World Around You" seeks to help the region deal with the problem of «social orphanhood», i.e. abandonment of children by parents who do not want to or are unable to take proper care of them. The principal cause of child abandonment cases is some kind of a distress suffered by the affected family. At the webinars, the experts and their students discuss the underlying principles of dealing with such families and the tools that are available for helping children and parents faced with difficult situations in their lives.
The webinars held in Amur Oblast were attended by 40 employees of public welfare organizations from Blagoveshchensk, Belogorsk, Svobodny, and Zeya. The experts from Children's Villages SOS acted as the webinars’ instructors. The list of topics covered in the class included prevention of and ways of addressing addictive behavior, an interplay between addictions and social orphanhood, methods for dealing with a crisis situation in a family, use of visual tools when doing work in this field.
Amur Oblast has joined a list of other regions that have been taking part in this project striving to prevent social orphanhood which has been worked on by SIBUR and Children's Villages SOS in the cities where the company operates since 2019.
We are elated that the educational program run jointly by Children's Villages SOS and SIBUR has expanded to include yet another region. We continue to grow a professional community of prevention practitioners in Amur Oblast. The project’s core mission is focused on introducing social care professionals interacting with families in distress to case management techniques and search for the most appropriate practices that could be applicable to their dealing with families in distress. I hope that our events will become a regular occurrence and will help strengthen professional ties between social care experts representing different regions of SIBUR's presence regions, Olga Lipnitskaya, Head of Orphanhood Prevention and Family Strengthening Programs at Children's Villages SOS’ Russia Committee, commented.
Previously, the joint program of SIBUR and Children's Villages SOS had been joined by Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod and Tyumen Oblast, as well as Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs. Its seminars have been attended by more than 450 people including specialists from government-funded and non-profit organizations and volunteers working with families in distress, as well as parents who attended a series of webinars on psychology and parenting and on methods for controlling one’s behavior in emotionally charged situations. The webinars are available to watch at: https://www.formula-hd.ru/projects/city/sos/