The core aim of the project Supporting life after institutional care was to promote the autonomy of young people leaving residential care and their access to local services and opportunities, in order to increase their abilities to cope with the challenges posed to them by the outside-world.

The whole project action concerned the implementation of a social experimentation in three countries (Italy, Romania and Bulgaria), which consisted in training and including a complementary new professional figure, the social intermediary, to act as a guidance for care-leavers in their transition from the child protection system to adulthood.

The inner scope of the project was to monitor, evaluate and measure the short term impact of this new social service and to identify the program effectiveness and efficiency, as well as its potential replication and sustainability. For the impact evaluation, we used a type of evaluation belonging to the category of randomized tests, which requires the selection of a group of individuals who receives a treatment (target group) and a group who does not (control group); the impact of the program is then measured by comparing the differences within each group and among groups, after the target has been delivered the treatment (the service).

A process evaluation, besides the impact evaluation, was foreseen and focused on how this new figure would be welcomed and integrated by the other key actors of the system: social workers, educators of residential structures and care leavers themselves.

During the project implementation we realised that the period of the social experimentation/service delivery would be too short to produce tangible changes on the lives of the target and in fact, the quantitative analysis gives us little evidence of differences in trends between target and control group, at least for what concerns concrete accommodation and working conditions. However, slight improvements can be noticed in the target group, as opposed to control group, in the psychological sphere: in particular we witnessed an increase in self-control perception and a decrease in depression.

The process evaluation pointed more clearly in the direction of the strengths of the service. All interviewees agreed in particular that the most innovative and positive aspect of the training and of the social intermediation was the emphasis on activation of the care leaver resources and the different adult to adult relationship aimed at increasing autonomy. The support of social intermediaries was valued by most actors (including care leavers), especially in developing a more active and concrete attitude to their future, especially for those care leavers who showed motivation, who were willing to collaborate and worked hard towards the goals fixed together with their social intermediaries, with whom they were able to build a relationship of trust, something which has not to be taken for granted among institutionalised individuals. The implementation process on the whole worked very well, especially in Italy where the service will be maintained beyond the project timeframe, thanks to private funds.

By Rebecca Zanuso