The Impact of Having Care-Experienced Young People Involved In Training Care Professionals

The project “Leaving Care - An Integrated Approach to Capacity Building of Professionals and Young People” co-funded by the EC is about capacity building of care professionals working with young people leaving care. One of the strengths of the project and of the training is the involvement of care-experienced young people as co-trainers.

This project is implemented in Austria by FICE Austria and in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Italy and Romania by SOS Children’s Villages. During spring 2019, 385 care professionals will go through the “Prepare for Leaving Care training” developed by CELCIS and SOS Children’s Villages. Training content and methodology are evidence-based and were developped with inputs from care-experienced young people). This project builds on experiences made in Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy and Spain where the “Prepare for Leaving Care Training” has been rolled out in 2018, successfully training 433 care professionals. Training evaluation and impact assessment show great results.

The workshop aims at sharing results from the project as well as introducing participants to the training contents and method of co-delivering such trainings with care-experienced young people (i.e. service users).

At the beginning of the workshop the facilitators will give a general introduction of the project and how the training content was developped. The main part of the worskhop will focus on the training and the participants will get to experience one of the training sessions which will be co-delivered by 1 Master Trainer and 1 young person with care-experience. At the end we will share results from the training evaluation and impact assessment and communicate key recommendations for further dissemination and use of the training as well as necessary policy and practice changes in order to improve the leaving care experience and outcomes for young people coming out of alternative care.