About us
What we do
Child welfare centre “Pastogė” is under the ownership of Kaunas City Municipality (the Owner) (address: Laisvės ave. 96, LT-44251 Kaunas), code 111106319. Owner’s rights and duties are exercised by the Council of Kaunas City Municipality. Its competence has been defined by the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Budgetary Institutions.
Our vision: help any child without parental care find the way back into the biological family, or into guardian, foster, or adoptive families.
Our mission: to make sure that each and every child can grow in the family that meets his/her needs. We do this by employing the most advanced methods of psychosocial services. Our qualified specialist team works with the parents of children taken into temporary custody, children left without parental care, guardians/caregivers.
Our goal: to provide psychosocial services to children without parental care, their parents, guardian families, foster households, and adoptive parents, as well as specialists at the community care homes.
Values
- Professionalism: we all are specialists in our respective fields, and exercise quality, fairness and responsible attitude in our day-to-day work. We always search for the best solution, the latest methods and modes of work, promote creativity, strive for improvement, knowledge, and take a pro-active approach.
- Cooperation: we operate together for the shared goal, exchange knowledge and experience, discuss and help each other with great pleasure.
- Responsibility: we all take responsibility for our work and decisions. In our work, we follow our principles and duty to make our organisation and its activity worth being proud of.
- Respect to the human: we believe that the greatest value lies in each human being, making every effort to listen to and treat people without prejudice, are sensitive to other person’s opinion and situation, tolerant, open to ourselves and the society.
History: In 1994-1995, a project completely new to Lithuania aspiring to establish coherence between the child, the family, and coordinated social care, was launched by three Social Work graduates, Žaneta Šimkienė, Ričardas Kukauskas and Dalia Kabašinskaitė (the Centre for Vocational Studies and Training (Vytautas Magnus University). Partnered by Caritas Lithuania, then run by Sister A. Pajarskaitė, the project was originally developed as an alternative for the institutional foster care system present in Lithuania at that time. With the extensive consultations by the teaching staff at the Centre for Vocational Studies and Training of Vytautas Magnus University, namely, social work experts at the US and UK’s Kent County social work services, the project initiators set out to establish a new service. The service would consist of the specialists who would promote new awareness, namely, that a child needs to grow up in a family, in the social policy and philosophy related to child’s welfare. Having believed in this idea, Kaunas city municipality decided to support it and, in December 1995, the City Council established the Child welfare centre “Pastogė”. In early 1996, the city municipality signed the collaboration agreement with Caritas Lithuania. Soon afterwards, in 1996 – 1997, “Pastogė” welcomed James Cox, a UK volunteer under an international project. His contribution during the one-year period was highly valuable for formation of the strategy on staff training and methodology. Relevance of the services covered by “Pastogė” has been evidenced by the development of its activity. In the first 8 years of our activity, the number of employees grew from 4 to 30. The period was marked by the intensive search for additional support, development of projects and programmes in order to develop the services and improve the facilities and resources. Throughout the period, the Centre saw rapid development and, to date, employs 50 specialists in child welfare.