With the financial support of the Tuzla Community Foundation, the Center for Social Work Tuzla acquired a car that will enable social workers to be more present in the field and facilitate their work. The vehicle will be used especially for work in the Local Community of Kiseljak, where the expert workers of the Center for Social Work in the dislocated office located in the Social Center of Kiseljak have a direct and permanent presence in the community.
With this way of working in the Kiseljak Municipal Health Center, the Center for Social Work started in 2018 at the invitation of the Tuzla Community Foundation for cooperation on the development of the Pedagogical Workshop model. The pedagogical workshop is a model that assumes partnership cooperation of all organizations and institutions whose jurisdiction and field of work is child protection and support for their learning and development. The main purpose of the pedagogical workshop is the inclusion and retention of children and young people in the educational process in a way that will ensure that no child is excluded from the educational process or neglected during schooling, and to ensure the fulfillment of his individual development.
The Tuzla Community Foundation implements this model in the Kiseljak Municipal Health Center in partnership with the International Interactive Open Schools MIOS, Elementary School Kiseljak, Ju Center for Social Work Tuzla, UG Better Future, the Evangelical Church, Ju Dom zdravlja Tuzla and the “Land of Children in BiH” Association. The Pedagogical Workshop team, with its multidisciplinary approach to work, achieved that in the previous five years in this settlement, all the children who were ready for enrollment were enrolled in primary education on time, which was not the case before. Support was also actively provided to keep children in education, and the effects of many years of work invested in each child are already visible.
With its presence in the community, the Center made it easier for the population to exercise their rights from social protection, but it also helped to increase the number of students enrolled in primary education, and to improve access to health insurance for children and adults from this area.
“The effects in the last six years, as long as the team has been working, are really significant. First of all, families who did not regularly send their children to school were greatly affected, and today we have the case that there is no child in the settlement who does not go to primary school. Many more residents exercise the right to regular health care through the Center, and we find out very simply and quickly whether a person has access to social protection rights. The number of people exercising their rights has also increased, because we have provided people with easier access to information,” Lejla Sadiković, director of the Tuzla Center for Social Work, told us.
The presence of social workers in the settlement was initially unexpected, but thanks to the methodical approach and the sincere intention of all actors in the team to influence the improvement of opportunities in the community, trust was soon developed among the citizens and became key in transforming the community.
“Everything has become much more open. People were given the freedom to provide information, report irregularities, and break some taboos, because they knew we would help. A lot has been done on women’s health care, on the suppression of underage marriages, we have identified many children who did not exercise their right to health insurance and treatment, and we monitor children’s absences from school and react. What made it especially easy for us was the fact that we have a constant presence of people from the Foundation in the community and that they are open and available to all residents of the settlement,” Sadiković added.
The Tuzla Center for Social Work is the only center in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina that has a dislocated office and works directly in one community. Due to the success of this work in the field, the Center is also considering the possibility of applying this approach in other communities where similar interventions are needed.
The pedagogical workshop is one of the measures carried out by the Foundation, with the aim of improving the quality of life of citizens in the Kiseljak Municipal Community within the project “Inclusive Development of the Kiseljak Community”, which is financially supported by the Freudenberg Foundation. The vehicle was purchased with the combined funds of the project and the Center for Social Work Tuzla.
Source: fondacijatz.org
