The project partners in ProGuard, a project co-funded by the REC Programme of the European Commission, have been working together to strengthen effective guardianship for unaccompanied children across Europe since October 2017. One of the goals of this project has been to develop a practical online toolkit for guardians. ProGuard partners are pleased to announce that the ProGuard toolkit for guardians and its training programme have now been published.
The toolkit is based on:
- the handbook ‘Guardianship for Children Deprived of Parental Care – A Handbook to Reinforce Guardianship Systems to Cater for the Specific Needs of Child Victims of Trafficking’, developed by the European Union Agency For Fundamental Rights in 2015;
- the ALFACA manual, developed by Nidos and partners from 2015–2017;
- other available materials on guardianship;
- the expertise and good practices of the project partners in ProGuard.
The toolkit directly addresses the guardian, and is organised around four main themes: ‘Your Mission’, ‘You and Working with Others’, ‘Your Well-Being’, and ‘Your Knowledge and Skills’. Both the toolkit and the training programme are available for free, in 8 languages (including English and Croatian), through the website www.guardianstoolkit.eu.
The project partners would like to thank all (former) unaccompanied children, guardians and other contributors to the toolkit. Guardians deserve the support they need, which is why the toolkit has been published in 8 languages. If you can contribute in any way to sharing the toolkit, please don’t hesitate to do so. If you have questions regarding the toolkit and/or its training programme, please contact: Liedewij de Ruijter de Wildt, project manager of ProGuard at Nidos in the Netherlands, l.deruijterdewildt@nidos.nl.