The Civic Association Sense and Sensitivity Receives O2 Foundation Award for Supporting Grandparents Raising their Grandchildren
Prague – O2 Foundation will announce the eighth winner of the O2 Foundation Award in the Monastery of St. Agnes in Prague tonight. This year the Award goes to the civic association Sense and Sensitivity (Rozum a cit) for supporting grandparental foster families. The O2 Foundation Award of CZK 1 million expresses a special recognition to a project that the Board of Trustees of the Foundation has found appealing for its effort to change the established social habits and open tabooed social topics.
In the region of Central Bohemia, there are 169 regular foster families and 374 families, in which children are brought up by their grandparents. Regular foster families receive support from the state – they undergo preparatory training for foster parents, their motivation is examined, they are accompanied as a new family is formed and they receive financial support. Unfortunately, grandparents who become foster parents receive no such assistance; they find themselves on the brink of social services and the entire social network. The civic association Sense and Sensitivity was the first organization to address this – so far neglected – issue in the Czech Republic.
„This year’s winning project is quite unique and rightly deserves our acknowledgement because it tries to address a topic that has not been so clearly named by any other organization in the Czech Republic,” says David Šita, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the O2 Foundation and Vice-President for State Administration of Telefónica. “By giving out one million CZK to the winning organization, we want to provide it with certain stability and support, we want the organization to be able to extend its activities and contribute to education in this area,” adds Šita.
A grandparent usually becomes foster parent unexpectedly, unprepared, when the grandchildren’s parents die, or after a long problematic period when his/her own child proves to be a non-functional parent to the grandchildren. The organization Sense and Sensitivity helps grandparents to cope with the loss and grief and feelings of guilt, tries to assist the family living on a pension with financial issues and help it out of isolation.
„We have formed regular self-help groups of grandparents who are foster parents, we provide support to several of these families in their homes, psychological consulting and psychotherapy as well as social and legal advice,” says Jaroslava Máliková, chairwoman of Sense and Sensitivity civic association. “Thanks to the O2 Foundation Award we can start building a space for our activities that we have been planning for a couple of years,” adds Máliková.
Sense and Sensitivity has been at the service of foster families for several years now. The Czech Republic is now starting to change its system of care for children in a difficult situation. New trends advocate the idea that each child has a right to grow up in a family. The number of children growing up in children’s homes and care institutions for infants remains unsatisfactory in the Czech Republic in the long run (for example, in Slovakia, these institutions have already been closed). Today there are 9 800 children living in these institutions.
O2 Foundation Award represents the culmination of the nationwide grant programme, in which the O2 Foundation distributes CZK 10 million among dozens of child-focused NGOs throughout the Czech Republic.
