Workshop 5,

Paul Meganck, Belgium

what we’ve learnt from integrating New Authority in residential settings.

Wingerdbloei is a residential and ambulant Child Welfare organization that offers educational support to, at year basis, approximately 400 children/youngsters and their family. During the first international 2012 congress in Antwerp we presented a lecture on how we were integrating the New Authority and the NVR approach on an organizational level in compliance with the existing mission and vision statements. During the last 4 years we’ve continued to explore how new authority and Non Violent Resistance could provide added value to support our clients as well as our care-takers. Providing training in other youth care organizations, we’ve identified similar challenges.

We will report what we’ve learnt from integrating New Authority in residential settings.

We ‘ll do this by presenting a “timeline” of the process we went through, illustrating interventions on organizational level with desired as well as unwanted effects on clients and teams. We will use video presentations of educators talking about how they experience working with NVR and how it affects them in their professional attitude and skills. We will add also fragments of a live coaching of a team as we use it for now.

Topics:

•choices we made, giving the desired effects or other sometimes opposite

•the impact of training and coaching

•parallels in the process of integrating NA in the organization and work with clients

•assumptions making us blind for needs of our workers

•influence of the existing expertise and culture on the integration of NA

•actual changes in our vision on education, residential care, team coaching

•new challenges

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Workshop 6, 25/5 16:30-17:45

Lieve Wijckmans and Phillipe Collart, case manager - Sporen

Muriel Princen, family therapist, ter Wende

Lieve Wijckmans, family therapist, ter Wende – Belgium

Parents group NVR

Parents groups NVR in Leuven, Belgium

Two examples of how NVR is done in parents groups

In Leuven, Belgium, the two organizations “ter Wende” and “Sporen” have introduced NVR in their work with children and their families since several years.

Because of our similar population we were challenged to work together. We needed to build a support group for our children because they were gathering in there peer group which leaded to more and more severe problems.

This tradition of connection and working together, made it obvious for us, to propose our workshop together.

Ter Wende is a residential organization for observation and treatment for 30 children with behavioral and emotional problems. In multidisciplinary teams we offer therapeutic support for children and their families. We have also the possibility for mobile support

In Sporen, a rather large organization with several residential settings and a mobile team for home guidance and crisis intervention we choose to offer an concrete NVR-program to parents of children also guided in one of the wards of the organization

Both organizations started with parents groups with child psychiatrist Hendrik Van Moorter as our mutual mentor.

In this presentation we like to show how both NVR parents groups are organized, how the programs has been compiled, composed, putted together, what the experiences are, obstacles and successes.

The NVR parents group in Ter Wende is an continuing group: during the guidance of one to three years, parents can participate in the monthly parents group. In this group we train parents in the NVR and NA principles in an open and group dynamic way. We connect these ideas with the trauma theory especially “the window of tolerance”. There is a link between this group and the family therapy that’s is given in the center.

In Sporen, two times a year, a series of 5 parents evening ‘Other times, other parenthood’ is organized where parents can participate. From the beginning this series of parents evenings was opened: fellow workers (colleagues) also could participate as a parent.

In this presentation we’d like to tell you how we work, explain our program and show some videos: interview with parents, role play, and other material.