Changing the Way We Care entered into an agreement with the Secretariat of Social Welfare (SBS) to use the department of Zacapa in Guatemala as a demonstration area for the Special Early Childhood Protection Program (Temporary Protection Home of Zacapa), selected to implement the case management methodology towards planned children reunification and reintegration of children and adolescents who are originally from the Zacapa department. One of the goals of the initiative is to implement best practices to prevent unnecessary family separation and strengthen families by identifying primary and specialized social services and bringing those services closer to the families.
The implementation of the agreement has included initial interviews and meetings with the Director and social workers of the Temporary Protection Home of Zacapa as well as the director, social workers and phycologists of the SBS departmental offices, as well as lawyers, social workers, psychologists and the Coordinator of the Interinstitutional Office of Guatemala’s Attorney General (PGN) to identify collaborative interventions and to design an inter-institutional coordination roadmap towards a healthy and sustainable reunification and reintegration of children currently living in the temporary home in Zacapa. After validating and rolling out the roadmap, CTWWC’s team of one psychologist and one social worker was assigned to work in the temporary home in Zacapa where they reviewed children’s files to identify potential cases.
In June 2019, the CTWWC team identified 105 children and adolescents living in the temporary home in Zacapa due to different reasons. A review of their files found that the majority of the children came from different departments, only nine files were from children originally from the department of Zacapa, which correspond to a total of 16 boys and girls (case files of siblings count as one single case). From June to November 2019, the CTWWC team conducted a revision, analysis, assessment and investigation of the nine files. Below is a summary of the process, results and lessons learned during this stage.
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