Circles of Support in India and Europe - on the way to inclusive communities

A COS is a group of people who form and meet regularly to support a person with assistance needs (main person) in realizing their own personal wishes and goals. A guiding principle underlying all COS is the aspect of self-determination: the focus is on the individual, not on a service system or a service route that must be followed. The key to COS is learning from each other and creating and maintaining relationships in which everyone does something for everyone else (according to the principles of solidarity and interdependence). Strengths and talents are thus multiplied and individual weaknesses are balanced out due to the different abilities of the group as a whole. In our project, the participants in the Circle of Support are primarily students of social sciences in addition to the main person; they can also be made up of family members, friends, acquaintances and neighbors. Each circle has a coordinator and the certainty of being able to obtain support and expertise from the university and service network.

Social work and human services professionals increasingly see their role as building on and expanding the resources of the community. This is associated with a change in professional self-image from caregiver and provider to expert mediator and supporter. This change creates new challenges and at the same time brings with it new dangers. Universities are called upon to redesign their curricula in line with the new requirements (including the explicit focus on inclusion in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and to incorporate guiding principles of professional assistance on the path to self-determination and community participation. This requires an understanding of cooperation with resources from civic engagement on the one hand, while at the same time raising critical awareness of the dangers of developments in social services on the other. These dangers include, for example, the danger of cost-cutting models through deprofessionalization or a short-sighted 'outpatient before inpatient' mindset, which assumes that a move from segregated and segregating institutional placement to the community is sufficient without installing an appropriate formal and informal service system. This project aims to contribute to understanding the fundamental right to community membership in all its complexity.

The aim of the project is to develop social, professional knowledge and action in human services on the basis of local and transnational learning processes in order to promote informal social networks (here: Circles of Support) with and for people with different abilities and needs in the community as an important component of social participation and inclusion. The main target groups of the project are primarily people in disadvantaged situations who would like to have a Circle of Support, students, university lecturers, practitioners and other formal and informal social networks. The main activities of the project consist of the reflection of experiences in the community, the development and evaluation of qualification offers in the regions, the implementation and evaluation of practical approaches, and the case-related analysis of Circles of Support. The overall project aims to promote intercultural learning processes and transnational cooperation between the actors involved.

DAAD

NYSASDRI Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India
Utkal University Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India
University of Bolton Bolton, UK
Klaus Novy Institute, Cologne