Help to Help Ukraine project won Excellence Award in Romania

Eurochild member FONPC won an Excellence Award at the Welfare Gala in Romania with the Help to Help Ukraine project, a story about helping and understanding. The Welfare Gala in Romania celebrates activities that benefit society, as a value of normality that is key to support, cultivate and assume as the supreme form of manifestation of humanity.

On 28^th of February, the Romanian Ministry of Family, Youth and Equal Opportunities, together with its social partners, organised the "Welfare Gala - 2024 edition" with the purpose of rewarding and promoting projects, actions and initiatives with a positive social impact implemented by associations, NGOs or civic initiative groups for the year 2023. Depending on their general objectives, projects were grouped by categories: child and family rights, community and social involvement, education and youth, social assistance and medical services, equal opportunities and domestic violence, and entrepreneurship.

Civil society was invited to submit a form with details about a project or an action that could be analysed in the competition. The form included sections such as organisation presentation, objectives, target group, sustainability, and budget. Eurochild member the Federation of Nongovernmental Organisations for Children - FONPC applied with the Help to Help Ukraine project and won an Excellency Award in the category child and family rights.

The Help to Help Ukraine project is focused on facilitating better integration and access to services, as well as the development of a system of responsibility for the victims of the war in Ukraine and refugees in Romania. Through the project, FONPC developed and implemented a series of activities in order to:

1. Assure capacity-building for FONPC's members, and for the Federation and build strategic relationships with the key stakeholders.
2. Support refugee integration in host communities and services for displaced and stateless persons from Ukraine, taking into account children’s right to participation, their involvement in decisions at all levels, and their adaptation to prevent violations of children’s rights. 
3. Strengthen participation and leadership of local civil society organisations, including refugee-led organisations (RLOs), in the response through shared advocacy, policy influencing and documentation of good practices. 

These objectives were achieved through capacity-building activities for NGOs (including organisational evaluation reports, coaching sessions and workshops), advocacy campaigns for facilitating the integration of refugees, trainings for professionals, workshops, debates and events for Romanian and Ukrainian children, studies regarding access of the refugees to health and education systems, need assessments, webinars, workshops and speaking clubs for Ukrainian refugees.

In January 2024, FONPC along with its partners Eurochild, ICVA, CARE and SERA organised an international conference about embracing humanity - RE:Think about the role of civil society organizations in facilitating the integration of refugee and asylum-seeking children and caregivers in Europe.

Project period of implementation: March 2022 - December 2024

For further information, please contact: Corina Rodica Andrei, FONPC Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator