Wingerdbloei
Written by: Paul Meganck
Internal Consultant Coach Trainer
‘Wingerdbloei' is an organization within the field of child welfare, providing context support, home counseling and (semi)residential care.
Between 2000 to 2010 Wingerdbloei evolved from a small scale setting, providing residential care for 16 adolescent girls, into a larger organization with several residential groups and a department home counseling, with classical as well as more experimental approaches.
Today Wingerdbloei provides customized residential and/or ambulant care, tailored to the specific need of every client system, with a capacity of 146 youngsters and their context. Clients are girls and boys (70 % are adolescents) and their context who have been referred by child welfare or juvenile court. Those references were based on problematic parenting situations and/or severe behavior problems or criminal acts.
This development confronted the organization with challenges both from a quantity level and a quality level, with more and more diverse complex and persistent problems educational and care situations.
By consequence Wingerdbloei as organization needed to find new and better answers in the way the care was organized in the residential settings. At the same time the need to embed and organize this care with and within the broader context of the youngsters increased exponentially.
Over the years these challenges were addressed, step by step elaborated and translated in vision texts, good practices, exploring new approaches (e.g. experiential learning) and consolidating them when effective. New frameworks, that were compatible with and/or broadening the vision on care, were introduced (e.g. collaborative therapy, signs of safety...). The structure of the organization was adapted in order to meet clients' needs in the best possible way.
In 2010 the vision, gradually developed over the past 15 years and formulated in several working notes was further elaborated and visualized in the model: “The educating – helping relationship” (read more details here).
Still we were frequently confronted with questions on how to translate this vision into action and communication in very tense and stressful interactions with some of the clients in residential or ambulant care.
Integrating NVR and New authority in Wingerdbloei
In 2009 Mies De Cock, one of our staff-members read Haim Omer's book - Non Violant Resistance in families. She felt this philosophy was very compatible to the way Wingerdbloei wanted to work with the children, youngsters and their families. She shared her thoughts with the managing director Jan Bots (M.D.) who recognized the possible value of this approach and gave it a chance. Later on the management concluded that this approach, not only offered an additional methodology for effective home counseling, but also could be valuable for the organizational process of Wingerdbloei.
In 2010 a four day internal training, with Frans Duintjer (Rhino) as trainer, was organized for the home-counselor unit. In 2011 Paul Meganck, Internal Consultant Coach Trainer, had a 4 days intensive training with the New Authority Center team in Israel. Since then a recurrent internal training program for all co-workers is installed (Read here more about the process).
Where do we stand today
As stated, we see training programs as a lever to support care providers to translate the Wingerdbloei vision on care into daily practice.
However Wingerdbloei organizes many other training trajectories on methodologies compatible with the vision on care, (e.g. Functional Family Therapy, Multi dimensional Family therapy e.o.). On this moment training programs based on the content of “non-violent-education” are further developed for youngsters and parents focusing on individual or group training.
The recurring character of the basic training trajectories, helps us to consistently focus on the essence of “what we should do and how we should do it” if we want to educate youngsters and support parents in their parenting in a non-violent and effective way.
We use the question: "should we initiate an NVR trajectory" for this team or in this family?” as a reason to take a critical look at the quality of our actions. Often we conclude that we still can improve a lot on “what we should and can do”.
In the past three years, two NVR trajectories were initiated within the residential settings, three in home counseling trajectories.
However, the real work is done by every co-worker, educator, context worker, staff-member, supervisor and management. Thanks to their engagement and endorsement Wingerdbloei stands where it stands today. Implementing nonviolent educating and helping can’t be done unless everyone participates.