Activists' Community

Hello,

It is my first response on the forum since the training in Tel Aviv. But this does not mean that I wasn’t doing anything with NVR...
Before I start I want to thank the team of Chaim Omer for the magnificent training! It gave me a lot of energy and ideas!
We now started with different NVR groups in our Centre, so you will here more about me, but here already 2 examples I want to share with you.

Coaching: I only can control myself & presence
There was a girl that lived in one of our studio’s who never wanted to talk with her assistant. The assistant went every week and tried to do a conversation, but without any result. The assistant started to doubt the effectiveness of her work, herself and started to have difficult feelings towards the girl. On our reunion we talked with her en told her she was doing a good job. We told her that ‘she can only control herself’ and that she gives the girl every week the chance to talk, because she shows every week her presence. The assistant felt better about herself and about the girl and there was less pressure on the relationship.

Telephone round in ambulant settings
One boy that lives in a studio in the center of Brussels has a lot of problems with drugs and alcohol. He is now in our Centre already 2 years, in different groups and we tried already lot’s of things to stop his behavior. For a while things were better, but we now heard that he started drinking a lot, doesn’t go to school and that he sometimes gets in trouble with the police. Everybody feels powerless because it seems that we tried already everything…
But then we came up with the idea to do an announcement… In this announcement we expressed our concern and took a firm stance against his behavior because we care for him. We told him that we would ask help of his friends. When we wanted to read the announcement to him, he was already there with a friend so we could immediately ask his help. The agreed to do this. Now we phone every week to this and other friends to ask if they want to say to him that we are concerned, that we want the best for him and that we want that he goes to school and that he has to be careful not to get in trouble.

Dear Kerstin,
Interesting, keep on going.
Concerning the boy and his friends: wunderfull that you managed to activate them. A colleague of Patsi (Bram) some time ago organised 2 supportersmeetings with interesting results. In the case of a boy, hanging around with peers, frequent schoolabsences, suspected drugabuse, ... he first convinced the parents to do a supportersmeeting. Their social network was very scarce so they invited people from the neighbourhood. 8 families responded to the invitation. They all reported similar problems !!! but they were facing them alone and now found each other and can take action together. As the boys also wanted to talk with Bram, he organised a second supportersmeeting (together with the boy in question). As a matter a fact they took some engagements to prevent him being placed in residential care. For example one of them started picking him up in the morning to go to school together ....

In our foster care project we also managed to organise some supportersmeetings, always with good results. The greatest problem is to motivate people, to convince people to seek for help in their network and to start acting in openness. This can be very difficult and often fails.

Yours,
Frank

Thank you Frank for your reaction!

It is a good idea to do the combination of supportersmeetings and the telephone rounds! We will do!

We are also faced with the problem that it is difficult to motivate people to seek for help in their network... So if someone has good advices...

In our organisation we are also faced with the problem that somstimes a child or youngster has practically no network. So thanks to the NVR training we also actively try to connect our children or youngsters to networks.

Hi kerstin,
yes, motivation is often the hardest part of getting families to turn to their support network. Many approaches can work. The obvious is of course relating to thier fears and reservations (thier embarresment, they feel uncomfortable that they will burden thier friends, their fear that it won't work). Here I try to motivate them with the confidence of past and accumalated experience, i.e "most people are happy to help" "we find that parents feel empowered once they create a network." Another approach is a gradual approach, ask them to tell one person or involve for example an aunt or uncle. Here we ease them into the idea of telling people slowly. Lastly, sometimes you can show them that they have tried everything and even though it is difficult, they owe it to themselves and to thier child to now truly try everything. Here i show them how determined they are to save thier child that they are willing to ask for help. And if the child is angry that they turned to others they can say, " we will do anything, talk to anyone in order to stop this behavior. "
But having said that, overcoming resistence to supporters meeting can be very difficult indeed.
best of luck
michal