Bringing the Future Forward - Supporting the paths of boys and girls leaving alternative care systems.

Stand by Me is an international capacity building project operating in the field of the rights of the child and young people. It was launched in 2018 by the Metropolitan City of Milan – in partnership with a network of organisations active in civil society in Milan (Italy), Gothenburg (Sweden), Brașov (Romania) and Nicosia (Cyprus) – thanks to co-financing from the European “Rights, Equality and Citizenship” Programme.

The aim of Stand by Me is to improve the efficacy of policies and interventions aimed and young boys and girls who are about to leave residential care or a foster family and who, when they become of age, do not live with their biological family because of a judicial court order (called care leavers).

The Stand by Me course of action has developed its thought by working in close contact with young care leavers, professionals and policy makers alike. With the experiences of boys and girls leaving protection and care services used as the starting point, the fundamental concept revolves around seeing the elements of vulnerability that affect them as talent and potential. In this regard, care leavers’ need to make crucial choices about their lives well before their peers have to, motivated us to consider them as “young people who are bringing the future forward”.

The tailored research-action activities established by the project Stand by Me have enabled us to gather the experiences and suggestions of more than 200 people, including young people, representatives of relevant institutions and those who work in the sector. During the International Forum in Brașov, we compared what emerged at a local level and arrived at a shared set of recommendations and universal working hypotheses to submit to policy makers in our respective countries. In the following months, we developed and integrated these intuitions, promoting moments of comparison and dialogue with more than 100 key people involved in policies aimed at care leavers in our four cities, to compile these Ten Commandments, which contains eight priority working guidelines and two universal principles that must shape the way we look at policies and implemented projects.

This document summarises the main findings formed by the international group in the course of the months spent working together, and reproposes them as suggestions and trajectories of work to inspire local action to develop policies, services and experiments aimed at young girls and boys leaving care and protection systems.

We invite you to subscribe to these recommendations for three reasons: to commit yourself to using them as guidelines in the contexts and organizations in which you work; to lay the foundations for a constructive dialogue between different stakeholders, integrating and developing this first shared document; to be able to bring a collective voice and a strongly shared message to national and international institutions.The subscription requested and the related data provided will be used solely and exclusively for the purposes of promoting the Working Protocol, and will not be disclosed in any way outside the project neither used for other purposes other than those stated. The owner of the data provided is Metropolitan City of Milan (project leader) and will be communicated only to the contact person of the European Commission (financer). Subscribe here>>>

Download the entire working protocol in English ☞ here
Download the entire working protocol in Swedish ☞ here

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The project is funded by the European Union