Summary

The world is experiencing a rapid growth of its ageing population. As persons age, specific needs must be prioritized, thus, ensuring they are treated fairly, and their human rights and dignity are honoured. This paper will pay attention to women ageing with HIV in a Trinidadian society with the aim of understanding their lived experiences, and ways they face double or sometimes triple jeopardy.\ \ Theoretically, this work was guided by a critical approach that leads to social justice which can be implemented in service provision for women ageing with HIV. A critical approach confirms social structures that perpetuate oppressive practices can be challenged and power regained.\ \ Feminist participatory action research methodology was used in this work, with methods of face to face semi structured interviews, one telephone interview, and talking circles.The findings revealed that women ageing with HIV possess the ability to negotiate their challenges, build strength and resilience through consciousness raising and support.\ \ Women ageing with HIV comprise a population that must be prioritized for inclusion at all levels of society. Social workers play an integral role in challenging structural inefficiencies that causes and perpetuate social injustices in their lives.\  This work highlights a social justice approach can be used in intervention with the population as well as creates new knowledge for further research efforts.\  Recommendations for future practice lies in an intergenerational approach, creation of safe spaces, restructuring social service delivery and inclusion of a gendered perspective from policy stand point.\ \ \ \ 

Keywords (separate with commas)

Inequality, \ elderly women, ageing with HIV, poverty

Summary

Social assistance policies are important policy tools to address the problem of poverty. In Taiwan, these policies have evolved in the last few decades to adapt to the changes of the socio-economic environment and the needs of financially disadvantaged people. The aims of this study are to demonstrate the level of poverty problem and show the extent to which social assistance policies can respond to the needs of financially disadvantaged people in Taiwan. It firstly adopts secondary data analysis and uses government survey datasets to analyze the problem of poverty in Taiwan and demonstrates how it compares to OECD countries. Second, this study uses the method of documentary analysis to review the development and main characteristics of social assistance policies in Taiwan such as family ethics, fictitious income, employment promotion measures and so on to discuss important issues and debates regarding the design and implementation of these policies. Moreover, this study examines the recent development of Child Development Account and its implementation in Taiwan. Finally, this study shows whether and the extent to which these social assistance policies can meet the needs of financially disadvantaged people and how these policies can be improved by interviewing government officials (including social assistance and employment service staffs), social group workers that provide services to support financially disadvantaged people and those who are financially disadvantaged. The findings of this study can provide the experiences of implementing social assistance policies in Taiwan and help to understand the advantages and disadvantages of some social assistance measures and their influences on financially disadvantaged people.

Keywords (separate with commas)

poverty, social assistance, Child Development Account, fictitious income, Taiwan

Summary

Homelessness is an extensive societal problem in Sweden which poses major challenges for the social services in developing sustainable and effective methods that can meet the service user’s needs. The RECO project is based on practice research and has mutual learning at its core. The aim is to investigate and analyse how evidence-based methods like Housing First can be sustained within the social services and how implemented methods can become resilient towards external pressures. The research questions are:What factors facilitate or hinders high programme fidelity and what are the Housing First tenants’ experiences of the programme?What conditions are beneficial when trying to work knowledge-based in the social services efforts to combat homelessness?What methods enables participation and involvement with service users?What impacts and consequences do the participation have on the involved social workers and service users? Our ambition is to present the ongoing research project and also briefly present the new homelessness strategy in Sweden. 

Keywords (separate with commas)

Resilient Communities,  Housing First, Service user participation, Co-production, Welfare transformation    

Summary

In Finland child´s family is the primary way to take care of a child. Finland is part of Nordic Welfare System that influences also child protection services. Supporting a child and the family as early as possible is considered important. Removing a child from birth parents should be the last intervention option. Taking a child into care means that the child is placed in a foster home, professional family home, or institutional care. Family foster care placement is a primary choice of foster care and in Finland child should be placed in a kin family if it is a child best interest. Social worker has a great responsibility as a determiner of the child´s best interest.My PhD research shows that\ social workers are looking for factors that favor placing the child in a kinship family. For that purpose they\ collect different kind of information for their assessment and decision-making processes. One of the interest is to understand different kind of complex family relationships and systems what can support child welfare or also challenge it. There\ are different alliances and sticking forces between different people in the family\ and kin.\ People are attached to each other. That is why kinship foster care is a unique context as a child protection service but also as a social workers work. Kinship foster care needs special expertise to understand multidimension relationships and family systems. Kinship care\ also makes the diversity of families visible and challenges social worker define child´s best interest when there isn´t only one right answer and a kin can take care of a child sufficiently.\ 

Keywords (separate with commas)

Child protection, kinship foster care, assesment and decision-making process