Looking back at 2016 “Tzuby’s Kids” activities highlights some interesting milestones:

• We’ve informed over 3,000 people on the need of abandoned children to have a family and how to adopt a child in Romania, including public events (e.g. in a central park in Bucharest).
• We’ve published the guide “How to adopt or take a child in foster care”, the only one of its kind in Romania, freely available online making over 5,000 views so far.
• We’ve trained 350 individuals in trauma-informed caregiving, among which there have been 100 caregivers from state-owned institutions and 250 foster and adoptive parents, social workers, psychologists and volunteers.
• We’ve contributed to a summer camp for 40 children and 29 volunteers where each volunteer had individual interactions during the whole time. All of the 40 children are from state-owned social apartments where we have already trained the caregivers in therapeutic interventions.
• We’ve been working on changing legislation along with Romania without Orphans Alliance.

In terms of aiming forward, we are already working on taking our activities to the next level in two areas:

• Opening the “Tzuby’s Kids Training Academy” to equip foster and adoptive parents on competent care-giving skills. As research shows, trauma can impair language, sensory processing, and coping skills, and can lead to perplexing behaviors that are often mistaken for aggression or mental illness. By changing the way abandoned children are understood and approached we aim for their emotional healing and a long term improvement on their quality of life. Therefore, the Academy is on top of our priorities as the impact is quite high in the lives of many children, either already in families or still in institutional settings.
• Opening a counselling center for psychological, legal and emotional support to adoptive and foster families and their children.

Besides the above, we will continue our already established activities – e.g. training camps for adoptive parents, a therapeutic summer camp for children from institutional settings at the end of June 2017, volunteering in these institutions, promoting adoption via public events, as well as lobbying for improving the foster care legislation.

We would like to express our gratitude to all our supporters without whom we would not have been able to pull all these together and also to those who will continue to support us during the next year.

May we all have a blessed 2017!