The Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Services has added a new one to its efforts to effectively carry out the foster care service offered for children in need of protection and care. While bringing a mentoring system with a team of experienced foster families, the Ministry will train prospective families with experienced foster families among over 6.200 foster parents around Turkey.

The Ministry aims to increase the quality of the service by implementing another important service with the "Guiding Foster Care System". It is planned to support families that are included in the foster care system with the project, which will enable experienced foster families to take more roles in the service.

With the Guiding Foster Care System, prospective and new families will be informed about child care and healthy child development. The counseling process including the transfer of experience from family to family is expected to make it easier for new families to manage the process.

Guiding Foster Families Play an Active Role

Guiding Foster Families will play an active role in the promotion of Foster Care Service. Experienced foster families will take active part in the promotion campaign titled "Foster Families Explaining Foster Care" to be launched. All these activities will be made more systematic with the Guiding Foster Care. The waiting adopting families will be primarily interviewed. These families will be encouraged to be a foster family.

Foster Families Tell Their Neighbors and Relatives the Service

Current foster families will have support to explain the foster care service to their neighbors, relatives, and other parents, teachers and school administrators in schools where children attend. There are many foster families who encourage their neighbors and siblings to be a foster family and are very successful in this regard. Guiding Foster Families will actively take part in the activities to be carried out to raise awareness on the concept of volunteering in the society.

The System Implemented around Turkey

The Guiding Foster Care system will be implemented in all provinces, primarily those with many foster families. It is aimed the implementation to function all across Turkey and all prospective foster families to benefit from the support of the guiding foster families.

What is Guiding Foster Care?

Guiding Foster Care is a mechanism to ensure that experienced foster families who provide care for children in need of protection for a certain period of time and have contributed positively to the development of children, share the knowledge and skills gained in the service with prospective foster families and other foster families regularly and systematically. Through the implementation, it is planned to ensure that prospective foster families and new foster families find answers to their questions about foster care service, and to provide additional practical support in a preventive manner in solving problems encountered in the service.