Since its inception, Yeladim has been operating a unique database of hundreds of families from across the country who volunteer to regularly host, children who live in group homes and lack stable family backing. This is in order to rebuild the children’s trust in the adult world and provide a corrective family experience and meaningful stability in their lives.

Yeladim has positioned itself as the central body of knowledge on the subject of “Accompanying Families.”

Project Description

Accompanying Families is a program that provides an arrangement for children without family backing who live in group homes. The program aims to give these children a stable base by matching them with a single host family on holidays and vacations when other children go home. This family will be with those children during the various challenges of life.

The professional model underpinning this project is that the best interest of children without family backing is that they should be paired with a single family who will accompany them as long as this is the situation and as long as they are not in a situation that is inappropriate for this arrangement or prevents it from taking place.

Not every family can be an accompanying family either. There are two conceptual stages that are key to the selection of an accompanying family. One involves answering the fundamental question: is this candidate family actually suitable? The other involves answering a practical question: would it be correct to pair this accompanying family with this particular child?

Yeladim has extensive professional experience accumulated over many years and has developed unique stores of knowledge and products in this area.

Project Impact

Yeladim serves as an important resource for the accompanying families – maintaining contact, holding tribute evenings, setting up an internet group. At the same time, it encourages the Ministry of Welfare to ensure that their procedures always include the relationship between the group home and the accompanying families, and the unique attitude towards children without family backing.

In recent years, we have witnessed an increase in the number of interested families and an increase in the entry of families into the database, but there is still a gap yet to be studied, between the need, the supply of families, and the matching of families from the database with children.

Group home staffs recognize Yeladim as a supportive and assistive body and thus enable us to enter into the conversation of the senior staff, including the desire to find a suitable arrangement for all the children without backing, together with the fears and thoughts about their integration into accompanying families. In addition, Yeladim positions itself as the main body of knowledge on the subject of accompanying families. Many from both the group homes and the community contact us to request assistance in finding appropriate families.