Therapeutic Foster Care for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees and their foster families (FORM) is a cooperative partnership between organizations from Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Cyprus in vocational education and training.

This project aims to help the most vulnerable children and youngsters, who have unaccompanied minor refugee (UMR) background and live in a foster care family, to build up their own life in the family and – in a later phase – within the local society they are living in.

National authorities are extremely challenged on how these UMRs have to be taken care of, according to national and international standards of child care and children's rights. Foster family care for UMR is a different and more recent trend, and foster care services are mentioning complexities and problematic situations that require specialized guidance, taking into account exile-specific influences, developmental phase-specificities, complex and multiple trauma-related dynamics, and, migration-related factors. The program provides guidelines and good practices for foster care professionals, foster families, and the UMR who are taken care of and authorities and policymakers.

Funding reference

FORM project is co-financed by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission (Ref. 2021-1-BE02-KA220-VET-000033060)