A New Path Forward: Early Childhood Support Through Collaboration in the Banská Bystrica Region
As part of its Joint Action Fund (JAF)*, Places to Grow (P2G)** is piloting and verifying a coordinated approach to providing early care support services to selected marginalised communities in the Banská Bystrica Region, Slovakia. The project aims to enhance the development and coordination of early care in the locality of Revúca and Jelšava in the Gemer region. While several organisations are working to support marginalised Roma communities in these communities, they operate in isolation. Therefore, this project seeks to foster greater cooperation among these organisations, specifically assisting families with young children.
About 6 months into this project, we believe it’s a good time to share one of our check-in conversations with one of the key people — especially as this project could be a source of inspiration for others in early childhood development and beyond. We interviewed Vladislav Matej, Director of the SOCIA Foundation for Social Change. This organisation has focused on promoting social change in Slovakia for the last 25 years and on changes in the field of early childhood care for the last ten years.
We have included a condensed version of these conversations below. The conversation was translated from Slovak, so please note that some texts have been abbreviated or adjusted with Vlado’s permission.
Why start a project like this in the first place? Why is it essential that we grow, invest, and work on a project like this?
For the last ten years at Socia, I have focused professionally on developing a special social service for early intervention for children with disabilities in Slovakia. A dream for me professionally was to create something similar for children who don’t have a disability but who are at risk socially, such as children who live in generational poverty or in segregated localities. I think that these children are very much at risk. When we look at how many children from those backgrounds end up in special schools, it is more than half of all the children in special schools in Slovakia. We have almost 35,000 children in special schools in Slovakia, and about 20,000 of them are from marginalised Roma backgrounds. These are children who may not have been born with any disability, but, as a result of their environment, they were under-stimulated and ended up in special education.
Why are you taking part in this project? What interests you most about this project?
For over a decade, I have been involved in early childhood development and even completed my PhD on the topic. It is important to me that the projects that we undertake also get as close to the people as possible, are implemented in real communities, and have a tangible impact on the lives of those who live there.
Because we have found excellent partners in the area (both in terms of the organisations and the people), the choice of why we focused this project on Jelšava was clear.
How has this project evolved since you began? What are some of the things that have impacted its evolution? What are some of the barriers you’ve experienced that have caused you to reroute, etc?
We chose Jelšava because we organized this project in cooperation with the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region (BBSK), a regional self-government responsible for social development. After a thorough analysis of where to focus this project, we decided this was the ideal choice. We realized the value of having an exceptional partner like BBSK, who helps us open doors where there is no cooperation or interest.
Maybe the barrier is that there are several organisations that operate here as Healthy Regions, which are under the Ministry of Health. There are the Omamas of the Pathways Out Program. There are outreach social workers and community centres. There is the YMCA in Jelšava low-threshold centre. These are all entities that operate in a given locality, but oftentimes, their activities are kind of parallel. They do not cooperate as much as they could. I think that, with this project, we are bringing them the opportunity to meet and share case studies and seminars. This allows us to work together to find a particular family and a particular child and to find ways that we can support them as much as possible, both as a family and the child in his/her development.
What has been the most surprising thing throughout this entire process?
Surprises come every day, so there are plenty of those. One positive surprise was that we hired relatively quickly for a particular role, the Local ECD Coordinator. Our recruit, Ľubica Dorková Hrivnáková, who is a social pedagogue, works every day developing activities for the project. We are thrilled to have such an educated, qualified, and motivated person in a pretty rural area like Jelšava.
She experiences surprises every day. Some are positive, some are negative. Regarding the negative ones, I’ll mention that we sometimes get a surprising degree of resistance to cooperation from particular people. Unfortunately, they have little understanding of the importance and value of collaborating.
Why is it necessary for people to invest in and care about this work?
Early childhood is a critical period. For decades, research and best practices have confirmed the value of supporting groups of people who have experienced a more challenging life.
In our case, these are Roma people, fellow citizens who live in poor conditions and who often do not have much energy left to devote adequately to their young children. Consequently, the starting line for those children is much worse and more difficult than for children from healthy communities. It’s very sad to see when those children are sent to special schools, get an inferior education, and then live again in those poor communities. Generational poverty is replicated there and repeated over and over again. They have a tough, sad life. With the support of early childhood programs, we do whatever we can to break this cycle of generational poverty. I do think it is of great importance.
The Joint Action Fund was a great support and motivation for us. Without that support, we would not have had such a project in Jelšava and could not have employed Ľubica as a coordinator. This has been very encouraging for us. Hopefully, the JAF will continue successfully for many years to come.
Are there any key takeaways you would like to share from this project?
So we’ve been doing the project since May this year, so it’s about the sixth month. We have managed to arrange such regular cooperation with many people and those organisations that are there. So it is starting to have some first signs of such a system. It is no longer just offering some kind of cooperation and going from organisation to organisation with field social workers. In three or four localities we have arranged such regular meetings where we will discuss specific cases of specific families. And we will discuss if they have any questions, what to do, and what could be done. So those first outcomes or something that is already becoming a form of reality is that we have managed to arrange regular collaboration.
Do you have any results that you would be interested in sharing at this stage?
We have had some great results, even though they are small steps. When we see families respond so willingly to an offer of support, this is so important. You can see the growth of trust. That is the first prerequisite for any programme to work in these communities. I think the increasing trust building with particular people is something that we could say is starting to succeed gradually.
What are you most looking forward to?
The exciting thing is that we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Because it’s a pilot project that has the ambition to test something in the initial phase, it’s really exciting to see if it’s going to be successful and to what extent it’s going to be successful. We can’t say 100% in advance what will work and how it will work. It’s fascinating to see that even in the very difficult conditions of that location. There’s a big magnesite plant there. There are no forests, bare meadows. There is a lot of economic and ecological burden, poor infrastructure, high unemployment, and abandoned ruined houses. This is the reality of this part of the Gemer region. It is so exciting to see that there are motivated people who have stayed to live there, who are developing supportive social projects, who are successful, who are enjoying it and who are loyal to what they are doing. So without such motivated people, any project that we brought in would be meaningless.
Any final comments you would like to make?
The Joint Action Fund was a great support and motivation for us. Without that support, we would not have had such a project in Jelšava and could not have employed Ľubica as a coordinator. This has been very encouraging for us. Hopefully, the JAF will continue successfully for many years to come.
Socia and Places to Grow are in the process of conducting this project and will present their findings at the P2G conference in Prague in November 2024. If you are interested in what we do, want to apply for the second round of the JAF, or collaborate with Places to Grow, please contact info@placestogrow.eu and consider registering for our P2G Conference in Prague on November 14th, where we will also present this project.
*In 2024, Places to Grow launched the Joint Action Fund. This grant scheme fosters innovation, learning, and cross-sectoral collaboration aiming for systemic change in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. This flagship initiative is designed to strengthen cooperation among Places to Grow partners and other relevant stakeholders, therefore contributing to creating a robust and evolving ECD ecosystem. It consists of financial and non-financial support and incorporates knowledge-sharing with the community of practice.
**Places to Grow, a catalyst for excellence in early childhood development (ECD), education, and care in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, strengthens relationships between organisations active in social services, education, advocacy, and research.
