Our mission

Taking a child into care and placing them in substitute care is one of the strongest interventions into a family's privacy. The core task of substitute care in child welfare is the protection of the child, which is why society has a responsibility, when placing a child, to ensure that this is realised. As a provider of substitute care, we have been entrusted with a significant task in the protection, care and rehabilitation of the children and young people living with us, and we are accountable for our work both to society and to the child and those close to them.

Protecting a child in substitute care is emotional work, presence, and a daily balancing act between safety, restrictions and the rights of the child. The work done in substitute care is one of the most demanding areas of child welfare work, and to be purposeful and effective it requires every actor to reflect actively on the core of the work — that is, carrying out work that is in the best interests of the child. Through a living discussion of values in everyday life, our work community has grown together and our work is based on a strong understanding of the operating environment.

We want to offer the children living with us a setting and an everyday life that is as homelike as possible, in which the care of adults creates safety and the opportunity to live as carefree a childhood and youth as possible. A child living in substitute care very often has adverse childhood experiences in their background, which requires a strong understanding and a professional approach from the worker. Alongside this, we want to keep in mind that the children living with us are at the same time living their own unique childhood, and that each of them also has needs and behavioural traits that belong to a normal developmental path. Growth and development then require very fundamental, ordinary things for support: a consistent and safe everyday life, patient and caring adults, good food and enough sleep. Accordingly, in everything we do we aim to strengthen the children's sense of normality, and we hope that while living with us they have the opportunity to spend a childhood and youth equal to that of others, regardless of their form of housing.

"Listen, Little My went on, standing right in front of Ninny and looking at her — you will never have a face of your own until you learn to fight. Believe me." (The Invisible Child, 1962)

Symptoms and challenging behaviour are a sign of the child's agency and of their effort to cope with the storms of their life. Sometimes, in unsafe circumstances, a child may have become invisible — adapting to the emotional states of others, even described as well-behaved. A child's invisibility can be considered more worrying than their acting out, and the aim of our work is to offer a safe environment for growth in which the child can become visible again with all their emotions. We consider substitute care to have succeeded in its early-stage task when this happens, opening the way to long-term work supporting the child's rehabilitation.

We support children in living a life of their own and in finding their own thing, in expressing their wishes and opinions, in standing up for themselves and in disagreeing constructively in relation to other people. We believe that in an everyday life of substitute care based on dialogue and respect for the other, growth and learning from one another take place in both children and adults, and that we can never consider ourselves finished.

A child's parents and close ones hold a special position while the child lives in substitute care, and their significance to the child is irreplaceable. Parents hold invaluable knowledge about their child and their family, and this knowledge plays a significant role in how we carry out the child's individual care and rehabilitation. The aim of our work is always family reunification, or supporting parenthood to be strong enough to act in the child's best interests alongside substitute care.

We recognise that it can be difficult for parents to entrust the care of their child to strangers, which is why building trust and a partnership in upbringing is our responsibility. This requires long-term, active work based on transparency and honesty. Partnership in upbringing means to us involving parents in matters concerning the child, keeping in regular contact and reflecting together, as well as supporting parenthood during home visits so that these are as positive and constructive an experience as possible for everyone involved. Parents and close ones are also very welcome to visit and have coffee with us, when we agree on the visit in advance.

For children living in substitute care over a longer period, the memories of childhood and youth are built largely around everyday life in substitute care and the adults working there; we are part of their unique story. One of the most important methods of institutional substitute care is key worker practice, the aim of which is to make it possible for the child to form a safe and reparative attachment relationship and to offer the child healing experiences. Key worker practice is participatory, child-centred, long-term, committed, appreciative, reciprocal and stabilising. Interaction with the child carried out on this basis is the starting point for bringing about change.

It can be challenging for a child to trust and to form attachment relationships, and the emergence of the relationship is therefore not necessarily easy. Responsibility for creating a trusting relationship always lies with the adult. The key worker is required to hold a genuinely curious and open attitude, and to set aside prejudices, assumptions and excessive expectations. Harm that has occurred in attachment relationships is not repaired in a moment, so there is no hurry. The key worker is not startled by setbacks, but is long-term and goal-oriented in their work.

Every child's needs for care and rehabilitation are different, which we seek to take into account when drawing up the child's individual care and upbringing plan. It is also our responsibility to establish the adequacy and appropriateness of support measures outside substitute care, and to make their realisation possible in practice.

In the care and upbringing of a child with special needs, we use, where necessary, tools and methods that make it possible for the child to be understood and for an interactive relationship to be realised. Our staff have solid experience of working in child welfare substitute care and they do their work with great heart, taking the individuality of each child into account.