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CPA hosts training for new,prospective foster care parents
Foster care can be defined as an act of rearing a child who is not a biological or adopted child.
It involves providing for daily needs and creating a family environment that offers supervision, guidance, nurturing and discipline in the same way as parents would care of their biological, child or children.
This practice of choosing a substitute family to perform the functions of biological parents has been pursued in Guyana through the Childcare and Protection Agency (CPA).
The CPA utilizes foster care as one of its programmes for achieving the objective of providing a better quality of life for children, who have been abandoned, neglected or suffer from other forms of abuse.
As such, a workshop, aimed at equipping new and prospective foster parents with the knowledge and tools essential to foster care, got underway at Regency Hotel over the weekend.
The two-day initiative was hosted by the CPA as it continues to uphold its mandate to ensure the safety and well-being of vulnerable children.
Participants of the foster care training workshop during an interactive session
During her opening remarks, Minister of Social Protection, Amna Ally, stated that while “the decision to remove a child from their home is always a difficult one,” the State is obligated to uphold the constitution, which is “the best interest of the child shall be the primary consideration of the state.”
Minister Ally noted that, “every child deserves and should be given an opportunity to succeed and to grow up in a safe, stable and nurturing environment that is free from abuse and neglect.”
She reiterated the Ministry’s commitment to “ensuring caretakers, have the resources they need to properly care of children in foster care.”
The Minister reminded some thirty participants of the workshop that as new and potential foster care parents, they have “taken up the mantle to assist in achieving the vision of a future that will ensure that our vulnerable children grow up in the environment most positive and natural for other growth, wellbeing and protection.”
The workshop was facilitated by Ismay Griffith, who has spent the last 30 years working in child welfare in New York City.
Minister of Social Protection, Amna Ally
During the two-day session, participants were given the opportunity to interact and share common challenges and work towards finding solutions.
With hundreds of abused and abandoned children in orphanages across Guyana, the Social Protection Ministry has been calling on family-oriented persons to take up the mantle of foster parents.
In the absence of their biological parents, foster care offers continued family-based care, support, guidance and love to children who were separated from their biological family.
Since 2009, the CPA has managed to put approximately 200 children in foster homes.
Foster care in Guyana was instituted approximately nine years ago with the aim of reducing the high number of children who are institutionalized.
Children are often removed from their primary caregivers because they were abused or faced the likelihood of being a victim of abuse, whether it is a case of physical or sexual abuse, neglect or abandonment.
The process of becoming a foster parent is very simple, since it is not an adoption and does not require the legal process of going to the court to get custody of a child.
Any person desirous of becoming a foster parent would need to complete an application form provided by the agency before a home study and visit are done.
Additionally, the agency would conduct criminal and medical checks on the applicant before an appointment is made with the CPA Director.
The Director has the authority to approve or disapprove the application based on the findings. However, if the approval is granted, the applicant will be placed on a foster care register before being matched with a child from one of the residential homes.
Children are often fostered for a period of three to six months before the process of reunification takes place. However, there are times when children would remain within their foster homes for more than a year.
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