Dear Colleagues,
five years ago we met at the Museum of Madness in Trate, Slovenia, in castle Cmurek for a
one-day working meeting.The meeting was very encouraging, bringing together many of us who have worked in recent years, decades on deinstitutionalisation, community care, human rights, democratic processes and methods that provides a life worth living for people who need continuous and long-term care and personal care that guarantees human dignity and the right to live in one's own home or in a small community.
In 2021, we made an important step in the Museum of Madness, we opened a Regional Centre for Deinstitutionalization, which is in its first year funded by an European platform Civic Europe. We wish to establish various forms of individual support, with which people will be able to live at home or at least in the vicinity of it.
The pandemic, which affected the whole world, the fact that people who suffered the most consequences and that in the most vulnerable groups are those who lived or still live in large institutions, encouraged us to do significantly more in the field of community care rather than continue to build large institutions. In Slovenia, the development of community care, with a high level of institutionalization, is even more important.
In the framework of the project we have made a goal, to organise a 2 day conference for the Alpe Adria Danube network. With this we will create an opportunity to meet again, share information about the situations in different countries, create lasting ties, and strengthen our international framework for deinstitutionalization.
In Slovenia large institutions are present especially in the North-East part of the country, in the countryside. Our studies confirm that the rate of institutionalization is at its highest in the North- East. In the first year of operations in the Centre for Deinstitutionalization we are planning to work with three municipalities, on the edge of the country, to set frameworks for careing people who live in the countryside. At the same time we want to actively work with two other projects for the transformation of institutions in our country, a Home in Kras and CTWP (Centre for Training, Work and Protection) Črna in Carinthia, and of course with good practices of transforming institutional care into community services in other countries: Italy, Austria, Serbia, Croatia and others. A special section will be dedicated to the role of women in deinstitutionalization.
We kindly invite you to prepare and submit an abstract for the conference and to write a paper for a monograph.