Category: News

ICDP training for Save the Children staff in Ormoc, Philippines.

Click here to see a photo report.

An ICDP certification workshop and ceremony was held in Panama city.

The event took place at the premises of the NGO “Movimiento Nueva Generacion” in Barraza, Panama city, Panama. For information about Movimiento Nueva Generacion see:  http://www.icdp.info/panama

On the last day, on 24th of November 2017 the first group of eight people (on photo above) received their ICDP diplomas as facilitators. A second group is still engaged in the process of doing their ‘self-training’ projects, to be completed in 2018.

The certification ceremony was attended by Nicoletta Armstrong, who led the training, as well as the NGO director and a representative from UNICEF Panama. It was agreed to expand the work with the ICDP programme by training parents from the neighbouring school and health centre. The ICDP team of facilitators will be coordinated by Antonio Mendoza. Another positive outcome was the commitment to fund the trip of two facilitators from Panama to attend the ICDP Latin America Gathering planned to take place in San Salvador, in October 2018.

Field visit: “I attended an ICDP meeting with parents at one of the centres that belong to the NGO Movimiento Nueva Generacion – the Santa Ana centre. It was parents’ eighth meeting at the end of which they received ICDP certificates of attendance. It was a pleasant event marked by a small ceremony with food and refreshments. Parents were happy to talk about their experiences and were pleased to receive a paper as a reward for their participation in the ICDP course. It was moving to hear one father (sitting on far left on photo below) share about his experience of change. He had been a strict father and used corporal punishment; he seldom talked to his two girls before ICDP, but after participating in the course he found himself talking and even praising his children – and gradually he stopped using corporal punishment. Other participants talked about a misconception, common in their community, concerning the effects of empathy. They explained that it was commonly held that children need strict upbringing in order to cope with the harsh realities of life in these marginalized communities, plagued by crime, drugs and violence. However, they said they realized during the ICDP course that empathy was a better way of building strength and resilience in their children.” – Nicoletta Armstrong.

The big news is the translation of Hundeide’s book into Finnish.

ICDP Finland is happy to announce that after years of struggling with an unfinished manuscript which served as a course book, they have managed to complete the translation into Finnish and have published Karsten Hundeide’s book “The essence of human care: an introduction to the ICDP programme”. All ICDP terms and concepts have  finally been translated and this makes both the understanding and the spreading of the ICDP programme a great deal easier, said the Finnish ICDP trainers.

ICDP Finland also informs that its trainers held training courses in different parts of the country and as a result there are now 22 new facilitators who are working with different groups of caregivers. The facilitators came together to exchange experiences and inspire each other at a meeting in Kotka, held in September 2017.

Through collaboration with different NGOs, ICDP Finland continues to focus on raising public awareness about the ICDP programe and its potential of supporting parents and families.

On photo below: A new group of day care professionals, who have just gone through the ICDP basic training at the family center in Pargas, Southwestern Finland, in October and November. “We had great discussions and many of the participants found that sharing their short videos from work was especially helpful in focusing their attention to all the wonderful details of togetherness and strengthening their professionalism as caregivers.” -Petra Zilliacus, ICDP trainer.

In the search to improve the quality of relationship between adolescents and their families, INPRHU has taken the initiative to institutionalize the ICDP programme.

The Institute for Human Promotion (INPRHU) in Ocotal, Nicaragua, has been developing the ICDP methodology with all the different target groups with which they work, by articulating their efforts with other Institutions such as, the Ministry of Education and the Public Ministry, as well as  withother organizaitons that work with families, children and adolescents.

In 2019, INPRHU leadership made the decision to strengthen the skills of  all its staff through training in the ICDP programme. 

” ICDP emphasises good interactions based on empathy and thorugh ICDP we want to promote comprehensive and loving relationships between adults in the care of adolescents, that would in turn contribute to the process of humanization of our society. 

We provide individualized psychological attention to women, girls and adolescents who have experienced situations of violence. The ICDP principles are being put into practice as a tool that directs this work towards personal empowerment. ICDP helps us to reconstruct their self-esteem and to strengthen their awareness of being people with rights and not objects.

The programme is particularly important for our community work with families in situations of violence –  we conducted sessions based on the content of ICDP, which was a very interesting experience, because it changed the way families perceive their children; it helped them to really see their girls and boys,  to recognize their children’s capacities and their ability to make decisions as persons. 

The ICDP prinicples have also been used as a tool and content of the Inprhu radio programme called Our Voices for Change, a programme that is reaching the entire department of Nueva Segovia. The radio is especially popular and listened to by families living in rural areas – with the ICDP content we feel that we are contributing towards the improvement of relations between adults, mothers, fathers, guardians and their boys and girls.

One of the important exerices that we apply, is the ICDP exercise that asks participants to observe photos of children with different expressions of feelings, such as Sadness, Happiness, Joy, Annoyance, Loneliness – and in this connection many participants remembered and shared  their experiences from when they were children, for example, when they were scolded or hit. They recognized in the photos their own felt sadness. The exercise also helped release feelings of empathy towards the suffering of their own children.” 

– explains director, Aura Estela. 

Mariana Jalba, a child neurologist has been using ICDP with children and parents since 2012.

Mariana and the team of ICDP trainers at the Voinicel Early Intervention Institute in Kishinev put a great deal of effort on promoting ICDP in Moldova throughout 2017. 

“We shared our knowledge with as many people as possible. That’s why we created an informational spot in two languages: Romanian and Russian.

We use it at different events such as conferences and workshops.

 It is available on our Facebook page and web: https://www.facebook.com/pg/centrulvoinicel/videos/?ref=page_internal.

Another way of sharing information about the ICDP programme was by including it in the curricula for specialists in Early Intervention.”

Paul Mmanjamwada, the representative for ICDP in Malawi sent us an update.

The Norwegian Church Aid in Malawi has recently provided funds to the Evangelical Association of Malawi to implement ICDP in the Karonga district, one of the boarder districts close to Tanzania.

The organization has already trained an initial group of 30 caregivers from different community based child care centres on the basic concepts and principles of the ICDP programme. We intend to select from this group a core team of 10 caregivers whom we intend to train as ICDP facilitators. It is also interesting to see how disability has been well integrated within the project.

ICDP network meeting
We are also planning for an ICDP network meeting that will mobilize all ICDP players in the country. It will take place in December 2017.

Translation of the ICDP facilitators’ manual
We have now finalized the translation of the ICDP training manual into the vernacular Chichewa and this will ease the process of ICDP training in future.

ICDP is still present in Bolivia.

In Bolivia, the ICDP programme is still being rolled out with the support from the Lutheran Church. The ICDP team counts on three trainers and twenty facilitators.

However, there were some significant changes in the local team as Gunn Strømme, who was instrumental in bringing ICDP to Bolivia, had to return to Norway. She was replaced by Anne Dagsland, a teacher, with broad experience of working on projects involving relationships in families and among young people.

In October 2017 a new ICDP project was started and for this purpose the ICDP booklet for caregivers was printed.

At Fundaţia Umanitara Pacea (FUP) an ICDP workshop took place on the 18th and 19th of January 2018.

Fundaţia Umanitara Pacea (Humanitarian Foundation for Peace) is a non-political, nongovernmental organization founded in 2000 by the Franciscan order in Bacau, Romania,. It was set up in order to assist poor and marginalized people and focuses especially on providing education opportunities for children and young people. 

ICDP, FUP and the Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) established cooperation in 2015, to bring the ICDP programme to FUP staff. NCA has been providing administrative and financial support to the ICDP training process at FUP.

After the workshop in January 2018, FUP has gained four new ICDP trainers: Cornelia Disca, Michaela Moraru, Dana Smerea and Lucian Mihai Bobarnac. “All their tasks and requirements for ICDP certification were carried out in a satisfactory way.  We had a small celebration with champagne, cakes and speeches. Silvia Breabin, ICDP trainer from Moldova was also present and she made a good and professional contribution to the group. There are six trainers now and they hope to organize a gathering of all the ICDP facilitators in Romania to a brush up on ICDP and hold an inspirational day. ” – says Elsa Dohlie, their ICDP trainer.

Silvia Breabin was trained several years ago in ICDP by Nicoletta Armstrong and has since then been training in Moldova as well Ukraine, but she is currently living in Romania.  She is now in contact with Nicoletta seeking support to establish together with the Romanian trainers an ICDP Romanian association, acting as a vehicle for spreading ICDP training more widely and systematically in Romania.

 A group of parents and caregivers have started to attend an ICDP course in Germany as planned.

On Saturday 13th of January 2018, an ICDP meeting for caregivers was held in the city of Hameln. Participants included two mothers and four professionals (three caregivers of special needs children and one childminder). It was the start of the first ICDP course to ever take place in Germany.

 “We had a wonderful meeting, in which we successfully engaged in building shared awareness, bonding and created the ground for sharing and future ICDP work together. I am very happy to finally get started with ICDP and this group! Some institutions, I got in contact with, are also interested in the ICDP programme and my plan is to offer ICDP training to different groups later on, i.e. parents of autistic children, education of childminders, and caretakers of older people.” – said Rita Crecelius (on photo above), the ICDP facilitator in charge of the course in Hameln.

An update by Nicoletta Armstrong

Ocotal
I started the ICDP training in Ocotal, Nicaragua in November 2016 and at that time I signed on behalf of ICDP an agreement for cooperation with the “Instituto De Promocion Humana” (INPRHU), a non-governmental agency working in the area of social development in Ocotal.

Since then, the work of ICDP has been steadily progressing at INPRHU. After my initial training visit, I have limited my involvement to just planning and supervising the ICDP training of the local team, which was taken over in 2017 by my Swedish colleague Monica Andersson (on photo above). She completed the training and there is currently a team of ICDP facilitators in Ocotal.

Monica has worked with the ICDP programme for a number of years in context of foster parenting in her native Sweden. In addition, Monica lived and worked in Nicaragua for several years during the 90-ies, coordinating a Swedish NGO focused on helping street working girls in vulnerable situations. Her organizational and field experiences from those years, as well as contacts have proven to be an excellent foundation for the development of ICDP in Nicaragua. 

Monica’s plans for 2018 include an ICDP visit to Ocotal in April, when she will be volunteering her work, although she managed to raise funds to cover expenses. The aim of the visit is to hold an ICDP workshop at INPRHU on the 12 and 13th of April, in order to consolidate the existing team of facilitators.

Managua
The ICDP foundation is in process of signing an agreement with a primary school in Managua (on photo below). Their school teachers have asked for ICDP training, in the hope of resolving some of the relational problems they are currently facing with the students. Monica will conduct the first ICDP workshop for the teachers on 7th and 8th of April and the second workshop will take place on 21st and 22nd of April 2018.