Closing institutions

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Today, home for more than a million children in Eastern Europe is a bleak state-run institution. These children, abandoned at birth or sometimes removed from their families because of a mental or physical disability, are hidden away in facilities that rarely meet even their most basic needs.

Institutionalisation can have a severe effect on a child’s life from causing developmental delays to bringing out autistic tendencies through to self-harming behaviour and physical disability.

At Hope and Homes for Children we believe that every child has the right to grow up with the love and care of a family. This is why we are working with governments to not only close state institutions, by moving each individual child into a caring family environment, but also to change outdated attitudes to childcare policy and practice. Closing institutions is just the beginning, not the end and we are helping governments put in place the alternative care systems that prevent children from entering institutions in the first place.

We have been closing institutions in Eastern Europe since 1998. To date we have closed eleven institutions in Romania alone.

As part of our pioneering work we have developed a unique model for closing institutions, which has been recognised by international experts, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation as best practice in the field. This model has recently been published in a ‘how to’ guide for closing institutions and is influencing the reform of childcare services across Europe.

However, there are still around 36,000 children in over 200 institutions in Romania but by 2009 we aim to have influenced the closure of half of these.