Partner Family Service

Abstract

Barcelona City Council’s Partner Family Service (SFC) provides assistance for families that are temporarily unable to look after their children due to particular circumstances (illness, hospitalisation, specific difficulties in achieving the work/life balance, alcohol detoxification treatment, etc.). In such cases, the SFC intervenes to provide a nearby family that voluntarily complements the work of the beneficiary family and helps them to care for children when they cannot. These partnerships can be highly flexible in form, and are adapted to the time that the partner family has available: a few hours a day, weekends, holidays, or the child staying for periods agreed with the beneficiary family, ranging from a few days to a maximum of six months. In order to ensure that the child’s routines are not broken during the partnership period, and so that they can stay within the environment familiar to them, efforts are made to find partner families that live in the vicinity of beneficiary families. This fact makes it particularly important to recruit partner families in all the districts of Barcelona.