The organization Save the Childen Romania together with their Norwgian counterparts have joined forces to make this project, financed with EUR 800.000, a viable one, i.e. a “centre of excellence” meant to promote mental health and to improve the quality of care for vulnerable children and adolescents through development of an operational framework and through development of training programmes for specialists.
The Center will provide children and their parents a first of its kind community based service in a friendly, non-stigmatized environment. The beneficiaries of the Center’s services will be children and adolescents with ADHD, anxiety, aggressive behaviour or at risk to develop such problems (for instance, children having experienced difficult life situations or coming from socio-economical vulnerable families) and their parents. Children will be assissted both in the Center and at home. According to preliminary estimations appoximately 800 children will benefit from the Center’s services at its premises, and about 3000 children will be monitored in their natural environment by the Center’s specialists that have benefited from the expertise of the Norwegian partners in “Save the Children Norway”.
The centre will be multidisciplinary and it will consist of three departments: service delivery for direct beneficiaries (children and parents); capacity building (training of personnel, supervision and technical assistance; resource development (e.g. studies, creation of materials, screening and diagnosis instruments etc.).
As mentioned before this project is the perfect example of a public-private- NGO co-operation towards problem resolution, with Norwegian public money covering all project activities, NGOs doing the relevant work and a private bank contributing the requisite office space for the centre to be able to operate in the long run. In terms of sustainability, this seems to be the winning stakeholder formula.