Multidisciplinary mentorship program to support the entrepreneurship of children in care and young care leaders

Integra project which is co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, is a multidisciplinary guiding programme for the support of youth living in care entrepreneurship but also entrepreneurship of youth care leavers.The project is coordinated by Hope For Children CRC Policy Centre (Cyprus) and involves partners from Cyprus (MMC), Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

INTEGRA addresses the need to equip residential care professionals to successfully support the social and professional integration of minors leaving care-systems.

This will be achieved by developing tools that will

1. build the capacity of such professionals as Leaving Care Mentors, and
2. support sustainable multi-agent collaboration .

The needs of children transitioning to adulthood will be considered while training Leaving Care Mentors to develop tailored approaches to integration focusing on resilience, forward goal projection (Losi, 2006) and entrepreneurial drive. The INTEGRA Mentoring Integration Programme (MIP) envisions a personalized participatory framework, where the mentor has the role to guide, connect, mediate, support the children in the restoration process of new reference points (in the absence of the old ones like family, culture, friends) (Haesevoets, 2008) for his/her future socio-economic and cultural inclusion as an persona integra into the community.

The direct beneficiaries are caregivers and legal guardians of minors in residential care. These will be trained to cultivate trust, and work with the minors on a tailored plan of resilience and goal projection.

The project will train caregivers as Leaving Care Mentors; establish cooperation networks and develop a Platform 4 Cooperation between target groups and stakeholders all part of INTEGRA’s integration programme from each ageing-out children will directly benefit.

The main objective of INTEGRA is to contribute to the empowerment and social integration of Care Leavers aged 16+ through a Mentoring Integration Programme targeting care professionals, and the establishment of a multi-agency support network.

Specifically, INTEGRA’ aims at:

• Comprehensively understanding and assessing the state-parent’s responsibilities and the careleavers' challenges when transitioning to adulthood life, through a participatory Contextual Needs Analysis (CNA).
• Developing and piloting a Mentoring Integration Programme (MIP) to train and enhance the capacity of residential care professionals as Leaving Care Mentors (LCM) to support the resilience, entrepreneurial drive and forward goal projection skills of children in care.
• Promoting INTEGRA’s implementation through a Collaboration Continuum Network of interested stakeholders.
• Disseminating the sustainability of the INTEGRA programme through the development of a socially responsible Platform4 Cooperation to connect state parents, care leavers, stakeholders