Collaborating with SOS Children’s Villages to help vulnerable families

This blog post was first published on our Norwegian blog and you can read the original article here (link to the blog post in Norwegian). 

—Family partners working with families will get more time for the children and parents, which is our main goal

SOS Children’s Villages‘ family partners help families in the child welfare service who are struggling. Through a new collaboration with us in Visma, the family partners get even better resources to assist the most vulnerable among us.

SOS Children’s Villages’ Family Partner project in Norway started January 1st 2022 with three municipalities participating in the pilot project. The project started in Finland and aims to protect vulnerable families by giving them a person who can be present in their everyday lives. 

The family partner assists the families in small and large challenges. This can include everything from practical help at home to attending a doctor’s appointment or a meeting with labour and welfare administrators. 

By building good relationships, trust is created, which in turn provides fertile ground for tackling the more inflammatory problems the family is struggling with.

Time is an important factor for achieving success with this project. To help SOS Children’s Villages’ family partners save time, we are delivering a separate case processing system for the family partners to work in. 

In the system, they get their own archive and forms. These are valuable for extracting statistics for researchers and the child welfare service. When family partners have a tailored and simple system for registering data, time is freed up to focus on building good relationships.

—We are very happy that Visma will collaborate with us and believe in the project. The technology they bring to the table allows us to use data for research in a completely new way. This is important to be able to take this project on to new municipalities. 

At the same time, the family partners who will work intensively with the families get more time for the children and parents. This way, we hope that more children can still live at home with their parents. That is the main goal of the Family Partner project, says Sissel Aarak, Secretary-General of SOS Children’s Villages.

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Early effort and interdisciplinary collaboration

The collaboration means that the three pilot municipalities get technical solutions tailored to the family partner’s needs from the very beginning of the project. 

We believe that the Family Partner project has great potential to strengthen the participation and legal security of the entire family who is in contact with the child welfare service.

—To make this happen, we identified the need for a professional system that can safeguard privacy and support work processes. It is also important to free up time to follow up on children and their families. 

This is something that we can – and want to – contribute to. It was an easy choice for us to enter into a tech partnership with SOS Children’s Villages, says the CEO of Visma Enterprise AS, Stian Svendsen.

For us, the collaboration provides valuable input from both municipalities and SOS Children’s Villages which is the world’s largest orphaned child charity. 

—This can lead to more business development and innovation, which will help solve the problems that need to be solved. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved, from business to end-user. The players can play on each other’s strengths and expertise, and in that way drive the technology forward, Svendsen explains.

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—We want employees in child welfare services to have the opportunity to do their job in the best way possible

In Norway, we are the largest supplier of IT systems to the municipal sector, and in a special position when it comes to child welfare. Our employees also have different backgrounds such as sociologists and child welfare pedagogues.

—We are really passionate about the employees in the child welfare service having the opportunity to do their job in the best way possible. Our consultants understand the challenges, both small and large, in the practical work in child welfare, and are often visiting the municipalities. 

This helps us get detailed knowledge about how the child welfare services’ run and what routines they have. Through this, we can create better solutions together, says former child welfare consultant, Elisabeth Kjølø, who now works as department lead for the child welfare discipline in Visma.

Sissel Aarak in SOS Children’s Villages believes the collaboration with Visma shows what can be accomplished when the right forces come together:

—We need more people to join the team, and we need new collaboration models to meet the sustainability goals. We are very proud and very grateful to have Visma as a new technology partner.