Joint Council on International Children's Services 37th Annual Child Welfare Symposium
The Joint Council on International Children’s Services is announcing its 37th Annual Child Welfare Symposium, which will be held in New York City, May 20-22, 2013 at the Conference Center, 130 East 59th Street, New York, NY.
Every year, the Symposium brings together 200 professionals in the area of child welfare, adoption, and orphan care for three days of information gathering, idea sharing, and networking. All those with an interest in ensuring that children live, grow, and flourish in a permanent, safe, and loving family are invited to attend. Workshops at the 2012 Symposium covered topics such as post-adoption nutrition, the future of international adoption, and the changing media landscape with regard to permanency solution for children. This year, workshops will discuss, among other things, the nutritional needs of children in institutional care with finding from research in Kazakhstan, China, Haiti and India, best practices in domestic and inter-country adoptions, lessons learnt in early intervention programs and integrated approaches to child welfare with a focus on China, Ethiopia, Haiti, and India.
Conference schedule, a complete list of speakers, and registration information can be found at http://symposium.jointcouncil.org/
If you have any questions regarding the Symposium, please contact the Joint Council on International Children’s Services at 703-535-8045 or symposium@jointcouncil.org
“Connecting People, Transforming Lives” Electronic Launch of the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance
Learn more about the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance during a one-hour webinar, hear about the importance of this initiative to support those who work with vulnerable children and families, and discover how you can become involved in ways that best fit your current personal, professional and organizational situation.
The Alliance vision is to work toward a world where a well-planned, well-trained and well-supported social service workforce effectively delivers services that improve the lives of vulnerable populations. In short, our aim is: improve the workforce, improve lives. To realize this vision, we need potential Alliance members like you to join and to engage with leaders and colleagues to help strengthen the workforce through advancing knowledge, exploring shared issues and promising practices and becoming strong advocates. In practice, this means:
Click here, or use the link below, to participate in session 1 of the webinar on Thursday, June 6, 2013 at 9:00am in New York, 4:00pm in Nairobi, 8:00pm in Bangkok. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3MG9LHH
Click here, or use the link below, to participate in session 2 of the webinar on Thursday, June 6, 2013 at 6:00pm in Los Angeles, 9:00pm in New York or Friday, June 7 at 8:00am in Bangkok, 9:00am in Beijing, 10:00am in Tokyo, 11:00am in Sydney. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3XVTBFJ
(The links will become active 30 minutes before the start time of each session.)
The 13th ISPCAN European Regional Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect, Dublin, Ireland
The 13th ISPCAN European Regional Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN) will be held on September 15th, 2013 in Dublin, Ireland. Delegates will have opportunities to share the current state of research and interventions on CAN in Europe and internationally, discuss new challenges and emerging topics, and help shape national and international responses.
The conference them is "Protecting Children in a Changing World” and the event will discuss the following topics:
Please visit the following website for additional conference information and event registration: http://www.ispcan.org/event/Dublin2013
Early bird registration is due May 31st and regular registration September 6th.
Relaf Seminar 2013 is coming soon!
Relaf has announced that its 2013 Seminar will be held during the first week of October in Guanajuato, Mexico. The event, entitled “Strengthening the Advances. Creating tools for the accomplishment of the Right to live in a family and in a community” will be organized with the cooperation of the Mexican Network for the Right to live in a Family and a Community, the government of Mexico and Unicef. Relevant international and regional organizations have also showed their support. The event will be a space of exchange between the relevant actors of the field of alternative care.
This year’s event has a very important background: Relaf Seminar 2009, which was held in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and entitled “The Right of Children and Adolescents to Live in a Family and a Community”; and the last Seminar 2010 “Celebration of the experiences: Strengthening the advances in the guarantee of the Right to live in a Family”, in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. The latter represented a landmark in the history of Relaf, for it gathered more than 1000 people from different Latin American countries, North America and Europe, among governmental authorities, representatives from ONGs and international bodies, foster families and children; and of course the highlighted presence of the president of Brazil at that time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In total, 2000 people from 23 different countries have participated in both of the events (among them, authorities from ONGs and governmental bodies, decision makers, practitioners, families and children)
The Seminar 2013 aims to take stock of the advances achieved in the field of alternative care, and to define our position about the goals that are still pendent in the region. Among the highlighted themes, there are the Regional Initiative for the de-institutionalization of children under the age of three; the effective implementation of the Guidelines; the Articulated Project between Relaf and ISS; the presentation of the “Report on Discrimination in residential care institutions”; and the training for the realization of the workshops with children and their carers.
Relaf has already started to work intensely on the organization of the coming Seminar and requests your participation. For further information, please write to: seminario2013@relaf.org
REPSSI Regional Psychosocial Support Forum 2013
Following the success of the 2011 Regional Psychosocial Support Forum held in Johannesburg, South Africa, REPSSI is pleased to announce the 2013 edition of the Regional Psychosocial Support Forum. The forum will be on October 29-31, 2013, at the Kenyatta International Conference Center, Nairobi, Kenya. The event will be co-hosted by REPSSI and African Network for the Prevention and Protection against child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN). The theme of the forum will be Mainstreaming Psychosocial Support in Child Protection: linking evidence and practice.
REPSSI encourages experts in the field of psychosocial support to submit their abstracts for any of the tracks of the three broad themes of Policy, Program, and Systems, Interventions, Evidence, and Psychosocial Issues, and Measuring Psychosocial Support.
Further information about the forum and its presented tracks can be found at the following link: https://repssi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=91&itemid=138
The Coalition for Children Affected by AIDS’ Call for Papers
The Coalition for Children Affected by AIDS (CCABA) is sponsoring a special issue of AIDS, the official journal of the International AIDS society, on the theme of Children Born into Families Affected by HIV for release at the 20th International AIDS Conference on July 20-25, 2014 in Melbourne. This is a Call for Papers for the above theme, and included in this theme are topics such as:
Papers from all regions of the world are encouraged as well as multi-disciplinary perspectives and papers dealing with neglected populations. Papers must conform to all submission requirements of AIDS, which are found on the website:
http://journals.lww.com/aidsonline/Pages/informationforauthors.aspx.
Papers will be subjected to the standard review procedures of the journal.
The final date for submission is December 20th, 2013.
For more information about the Special Issue: Children Born into Families Affected by HIV, please contact: Linda Richter at lrichter@hsrc.ac.za or Lynne Mofenson at mofensol@exchange.nih.gov
The International Day for Street Children was celebrated in 129 countries for the third year running on April 12, 2013. The International Day for Street Children serves as a platform for street children around the world – and their champions – to speak out so that their rights are not ignored. This year’s theme was Home Street Home, highlighting that for many children the street is their home, the place where they forge an identity for themselves and often sleep. Details on the events that took place can be found here.
2013 also saw the launch of a campaign for UN recognition of the International Day for Street Children. The Day was launched by the Consortium for Street Children in 2011. However, it is vital that the Day is not owned by any one organisation; with UN recognition comes greater global exposure of the issue, continuity and increased pressure on governments to act. So far, over 3000 people from 106 countries have signed the online petition calling on the UN to recognise the Day. With even more public support we will be one step closer to making this a reality. To sign the petition and find out how else you can get involved, please visit: www.streetchildrenday.org.