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Eeva Toivanen, The Finnish Association of Social Enterprises, ARVO
SOS CHILDREN’S VILLAGES SOCIAL ENTERPRISE CASE STUDY
Organisational background
Societal need2
SOS Children’s Villages is an international organisation with operations in over 130 countries. The Finnish branch was established in 1962 and today it operates in over ten locations around Finland. They offer different services for underserved families and children, like foster care, family rehabilitation, support families, after care, family work and family partner service. In 2019 they helped almost 1300 children in their services.
Approximately 100,000 children live in vulnerable conditions and almost 19,000 have been placed outside their homes in Finland. Even if Finland has a good variety of public child welfare services, research shows that they do not succeed in meeting the needs of individual families at the right time. A small number of families is using an increasing number of services without the desired outcomes. SOS Children’s Villages Finland started a joint development project with the municipality of Varkaus in 2016. Together they wanted to find out the points where in the service paths intervention would most be needed and what could be done earlier so that the problems would not escalate. They found out that for about 1–2 years the families in need are using about 1–2 welfare services and after this “search period” the number of services escalates up to even six simultaneously in use.
Vision The vision of SOS Children’s Villages is that every child grows up with love, respect and security and has the opportunity to reach his/her full potential. The long-term societal goal is to prevent the children of underprivileged families from inheriting their parents’ situation, prevent the social exclusion of children and youth and thus save public money. It is estimated that by cutting the number of children taken into custody by 20%, €300m of public money could be saved annually. The vision is that youth are supported on their path to adulthood and families are supported until their own wings carry them. Social exclusion is prevented.
SOS Children’s Villages and the city of Varkaus came to the conclusion that the child welfare services are ill-coordinated, don’t discuss with each other and most of all don’t look at the family’s situation as whole. The intervention should start earlier.3
