TOOpening our homes to welcome refugee children from Ukraine is a demanding choice that many families, at the moment, are ready to make. They travel with their mothers, aunts or grandmothers, they explain from Arca Solidale, one of the associations that deal with coordinating hospitality. A datum, that of space in the home, to be taken into account in order to offer to host refugee children and their mothers.
For Piedmont and Lombardy, on the Arca Solidale website you can fill in a form to give your willingness to welcome refugees, specifying the number of free beds in the house. It should be considered that children arrive, rightly, accompanied. The reception period is indefinite but it must be foreseen that it can also be very long.
Online courses to prepare to welcome refugees
It also deals with coordinating families who want to welcome refugees with arriving children Ai.Bi. – Children’s friends which also organizes free webinars to prepare to host. Because opening your home to a minor coming from a war situation is no joke (all the appointments up to 8 March have already been completed, you can register for the next ones by writing to [email protected]). Ai.bi. has been operating for years in Ukraine and Moldova and is currently verifying whether the children she takes care of on the territory are safe and whether they can be hosted, possibly with their mothers, in the families who have adopted them at a distance and with whom, in recent years, they have woven an emotional relationship. The network of families who have already hosted children in the past is active but even those who have never done it can get involved by writing to [email protected].
Welcome Refugees and Caritas, other reception possibilities
Another association that can be contacted is Refugees Welcome Italy (here the form to register your home), committed to managing the many requests for availability arrived.
Another possible way to go is to turn to your own diocese. There Caritas Ambrosiana in particular, it is promoting the collection of housing availability in the network of parishes throughout the Diocese of Milan: to report availability, you can write to the address [email protected]. And Emergency is also collecting the funds available from its volunteers to make them available to the competent services. You can then also contact theMond Citizens Associationor (citizens of the [email protected]) and to the AVIB Federation ([email protected]) who are creating mailing lists of available families.
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