Two years ago, “Tzuby’s Kids” Association was born out of the desire to help as many abandoned children to have a family. During these two years, we have seen children coming in loving families that would have been institutionalized for life, we have seen parents learning how to help the healing process of children with trauma history and we have met wonderful people willing to sacrifice personal comfort and resources to provide a family for institutionalized children.

This is a moment when we assess to what extent we reach our goal and what we plan to do next. 

How do we reach our goal?

If we were to visualize our purpose and our projects, we would see them like this:

Lobbying and advocacy activities, raising awareness and counseling on foster care and adoption, as well as volunteering and contributions to camps for institutionalized children are triggering factors for potential adoptive parents and foster parents to understand the need and have the opportunity to decide to offer a child a family. The “Tzuby’s Kids TV” project , which we have planned for the next year, targets the same thing.

With the other activities, we have directly “embraced” our goal as they are direct support services for people who have already taken the adoption or foster care step. In this sense, we have training camps and courses of the “Training Academy” as well as support groups. The art and game therapy project for foster or adopted children is also a very important project for us as it directly contributes to the healing process of children that have experienced abandonment, severe neglect, or abuse.In the coming year, this project will have the highest priority in our strategy.

What do we currently do?

Raising awareness, counselling and support for foster care and adoption

• Counselling for Adoption and Family Placement. We’ve had dozens of counselled families, some have chosen to adopt, others to foster care. Families who chose family placement took children who would have had no chance of adoption or were already institutionalized.
• Support groups and training camps for adoptive and foster parents.

Training Academy

• Competent caregiving courses for adoptive and foster parents, volunteers and caregivers.
• Courses to improve parenting skills in collaboration with FamilyLife Romania.

Lobby & Advocacy

• Legislation is still a blocking factor for 97% of children in the protection system who are unadoptable and unintegrated in their families either. Only 1.5% of the institutionalized children have an “adoptable” status.
• We act as members of the Romanian Orphaned Alliance (ARFO) and we are part of the working group of a set of legislative changes that will enter the parliamentary flow by the end of 2017.

What do we want to do next?

Art & Play Therapy

The project aims to help heal children adopted or placed in foster care (eg, ADHD, aggression, separation anxiety, reactive disorder of attachment). The children will have an initial assessment to identify the problems that we will address and will follow individualized intervention programs.

Tzuby’s Kids TV

The project aims to support lobbying and advocacy activities as well as information. The broadcasts will be broadcast via Facebook / YouTube and promoted through social media.

Stay tuned!