Working meetings with employees of closed-type institutions

While pupils of closed type institutions were involved in summer charity events, employees of these institutions had working meetings. They were included into the project “Not nearby, but together: contact person for teenagers at risk". The subject of these meetings was the work of contact persons and their interaction with pupils. Participants of the event were educators, social educators and psychologists of institutions.

The work model “The Contact Person” was presented in each institution. It was not new kind of help to teenagers for many specialists. Participants shared their experience, asked lots of questions, shared their problems and discussed ways out of those problems during the presentation. The model “The Contact Family” became a new kind of work. Despite the fact that in some institutions it is already in practice, some have heard about it for the first time. The peculiarity of this model is that a family supports a teenager, not one person. There are not many contact families, but we are searching for those families who have a desire to support pupils and their parents.

Also the theme of pupils’ graduating and their further life was raised. “The Contact Person” model implies working with graduates, but the difficulty is that not all graduates want to keep in touch with their contact friends. Because of this we decided to talk about this model not only when contact persons arrive, but during the time while a teenager is in school. Co-workers will tell pupils about contact persons, that they are not only people with whom they can play or have fun when they arrive to school. Contact persons are people who can solve pupils’ problems while they are in school, contact persons can help pupils’ when they leave closed-type institutions. They will always help when a pupil needs help.

Because of these meeting several issues were raised which we should be noticed if we want our cooperation to be more productive for teenagers.