This video from Globalsl.org, produced by Kindea Labs, describes both the negative impacts of orphanage volunteering and tourism as well as the ways in which international volunteering can be conducted appropriately for a positive impact on a community.

This document includes the Minimum Standards on Alternative Care for Children set out by the Government of Cambodia, including both the Minimum Standards for Residential Care for Children and the Minimum Standards on Alternative Care for Children in the Community.

This Prakas is intended to define roles and responsibilities of relevant competent agencies and establish procedures, operational guides, and forms to implement the Policy on Alternative Care for Children.

This document presents the full policy on the alternative care of children in Cambodia.

This video describes the work of the Alternative Care Panel in Uganda, a panel composed of professionals who assess the stability of potential adoptive or foster parents to determine if the parents can provide for needy and vulnerable children, with the ultimate goal of keeping children out of institutional settings and in family-based care.

This post from the Faith to Action Initiative highlights the work of the Abide Family Center in Uganda, which helps to keep families together.

This 6-minute video from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University explains the importance of human interaction with a caregiver to an infant’s brain development and the dangers of neglect to a child’s cognitive development, particularly the neglect that occurs in institutional settings.

This paper presents a policy position which argues that, “as the Greek authorities map out the road to long-term recovery, several key steps to reform the child protection and care system should be taken as a matter of priority.”

The Common European Guidelines on the Transition from Institutional to Community-based Care (‘the Guidelines’) provide practical advice about how to make a sustained transition from institutional care to family-based and community-based alternatives for individuals (including children) currently living in institutions and those living in the community, often without adequate support. 

This toolkit, originally published in September 2010 and updated in February 2015, serves as a resource for social workers in the US who are working with immigrant families within the child welfare system.

This Guide, written in Spanish, features a compilation of several social protection programs, services and public policies that resulted in the prevention of family breakdown and in the support of families and communities in caring and protecting their children.  All these examples are taken from the Latin American region, Italy and Romania.

Esta Guía, escrito en español, es una herramienta diseñada para colaboración con profesionales quienes trabajan en la implementación y manejo de programas de acogimiento familiar en América Latina. 

In 2015, the Parliament of the Republic of Uganda considered the Children Amendment Bill, which has several implications for children’s care in the country. The object of the bill is to amend the Children Act Cap. 59, enhance protection of a child, provide for the guardianship of children, provide for inter country adoption, prohibit corporal punishment, and provide for related matters.

In 2013 The Better Care Network and Save the Children UK began an inter-agency initiative to review and share existing knowledge on international volunteerism as related to the alternative care of children in developing countries.

This paper provides a brief overview of basic family structures in EU countries and a description of family breakdown and its impact on children’s wellbeing.

This review synthesized the literature from 1990 to 2013 regarding the subject of grandparents raising grandchildren, particularly grandchildren with disabilities.

This study focuses on examining the mediating effects of social support on familial well-being or quality of life in order to help professionals identify and enhance sources of support for all grandparent caregivers.

This quasi-experimental study tested a model of adult mentorship and support to improve psychosocial outcomes among youth-headed households in a rural area of Rwanda.

This report presents the strategic thinking and proposed stages of development of the Better Volunteering Better Care initiative, as a result of its work during its first year.

This paper provides new evidence on parent and child reporting of corporal punishment, drawing on data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study of families in 20 medium to large US cities.

This study described the magnitude of physical abuse during childhood in a representative sample of young adults selected from public universities in Albania, and to identify relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and behavioural/lifestyle factors associated with adverse childhood experiences.

This literature review highlights the practices, policies and research on violence and abuse prevention in early childhood. it is guided by a socio-ecological model of contexts, participants and interactional complexity.

This article examines the recruitment and transportation of internally trafficked children from Benue State in the north-central geo-political zone of Nigeria to Oyo State in the south-western zone of Nigeria

This National Gender and Children Policy developed by the Ghana Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs aims to mainstream gender concerns in the national development process.

This executive summary is the first document in a series of six reports, from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University (ISS), about the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy, held in August 2014.