Civic Association Prijatie and its Humanitarian Mission: Helping Young People The word help is emphasized many times today in various contexts. Each of us surely needs it, yet only rarely does one actually experience it. In our survey we focused on the civic association Prijatie, which directs its work toward helping a specific group in society, namely youth. As the saying goes, “nobody is perfect,” and this also applies to contemporary youth, which increasingly faces the need to address social problems. One of the options to help them are non-governmental non-profit organizations, which, through their activities, also operate in areas focused on helping youth, such as the development of intercultural education, mobility, initiatives, creativity, and also try to improve their lives and to help them cope more quickly with problems. This topic is important because at present society does not pay as much attention to youth as it should.
Non-profit organizations have a varied and multifaceted face. They also appear as volunteer groups of people who serve those who need it most, but also as established teams of professionals who are experts, creating alternative concepts of public policy and working with lobbying or advocacy (Ondrušek, 1998).
“A non-profit organization is generally perceived worldwide as a public-benefit organization that is not exclusively business-oriented. It is not established for the purpose of generating profit for private individuals. It may have income above what is necessary to cover its own costs, but the financial surplus cannot be used for the private benefit of founders, members, and employees of the non-profit organization, nor for their group interests. In general, in Europe, a non-profit organization may generate profit, but it must reinvest all of it into the core activity for which it obtained the non-profit status” (Kuvíková, 2004, p. 6).
Non-governmental non-profit civic associations complement the educational role of the family, but above all the educational and educational function of school. Civic associations of children and youth offer active use of free time, shaping the young person and strengthening their participation and involvement in co-decision-making in social life, and in this way enable young people to become active participants in social change in their environment. They also enable them, through non-formal education, to naturally develop their abilities and talent while preparing young people for future life. An important source of financial support for these civic associations of children and youth is the grant from the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. The granting of this subsidy is provided under the program for support of work with children and youth - ADAM (Občianske združenie, 2008).
Activity of the Civic Association Prijatie, Spišská Nová Ves Civic Association Prijatie is an association with nationwide reach with a humanitarian mission. It was founded in 1995 together with the drug dependence prevention center. It was a coordinated activity of three components, namely psychiatry, clinical psychology, and social work. There were several reasons for its establishment: misuse of addictive substances by youth, increased alcohol consumption, truancy, family and relationship problems. Many families fell into financial crisis and one solution was traveling abroad for work. As a result, incomplete families emerged, in which children had no routine, had no place to resolve their problems, stayed alone at home, and thus had free access to alcohol. The civic association Prijatie reached this troubled youth and felt obliged to focus more intensively on them and offer professional help. In addition to the civic association, a remote crisis line (helpline) was also established, through which many people in acute states in which they intended to take their own lives were helped via telephone contact. People also faced barriers because they refused to address their problems through personal visits to a psychologist and especially because of social prejudice. Use of the line helped people to speak openly and thereby overcome distrust, fear, and motivated them to a personal meeting. They then felt much safer, because they were informed about who and where would be waiting for them and thus gained the feeling that someone was interested in helping them find solutions to their problems. A professional team caring for these clients includes a special educator, psychologist, counseling psychologist, primary-contact doctors, and specialist physicians.
The main target group for which prevention and counseling are intended is minors with behavioral disorders related to the misuse of addictive substances, who neglect mandatory school attendance and have committed acts with signs of a criminal offense. Youth is the most vulnerable group in society, as it seeks models in life, whether relational, work-related, or social. It is a threatened group that tries to orient itself in a complex world.
Given the high number of increasing social and health problems among youth, civic association Prijatie proposed establishing social prevention and counseling activities in accordance with Act No. 195/1998 Coll. on Social Assistance, which it submitted to the Košice self-governing region, and after approval and assessment by the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic it obtained authorization to carry out social prevention and counseling.
Options for Solving Youth Problems
The solution offered by civic association Prijatie to alleviate the current problems of young people consists mainly of three types of prevention and counseling. All types of prevention are important for different reasons. Primary prevention primarily consists of talks, education about possible risks from using addictive substances, and guiding youth toward a healthy lifestyle. The most important is the promotion of primary prevention in the first stage of primary school, because there youths still do not tend to use addictive substances and have only minimal experience with smoking or alcohol. That is when primary prevention is best carried out. Secondary prevention prevents worsening and recurrence of disorders in psychological or social development that have developed in youth. A strength of the civic association is to intercept and guide youth for whom secondary prevention is needed, carried out in the form of individual therapies. The youth themselves are interested in resolving their problems and attend these preventions by their own decision and when needed. To these two types of prevention is added tertiary prevention, whose task is to work with clients who have already been hospitalized and returned from treatment due to their problems. Its task is mainly to prevent deterioration of condition and reduce the social and personality consequences of socio-pathological phenomena in the client. The timeliness and availability of services and care for clients is an example of a well-functioning civic association, which through its devotion makes its services available throughout the week, including weekends.
Statistics on the number of clients of civic association Prijatie vary, because it depends on whether clients appear only once and then leave for work abroad. Some are new clients who attend meetings regularly. However, three to ten clients use this association daily. Sometimes this is only an information visit and sometimes it is long-term accompanying through psychotherapy sessions.
Reasons why youth attends this association are varied. It depends on the age of the clients and the type of problem. Pre-school youth usually has developmental learning disorders, which means that children are restless, hyperactive, nervous, unstable, suffer from insomnia, and are in some way problematic during the period when they attend school. Youth with pubertal manifestations is critical; truancy occurs, they resist adults, and try to test their possibilities in the adult world. With this group, prevention is conducted in a very qualified and sensitive way, considering the age of the given group, so that young people do not reject help at the beginning. The request for help and the possibility to undergo one of the prevention options was tried by youth of all age categories.
Scope of Services Provided by the Civic Association Prijatie
Because civic association Prijatie helps youth in particular, it provides a broad range of activities that are free of charge in the first place. Clients can attend group sessions within secondary and tertiary prevention, group relaxation exercises. It also offers individual social work with the client, which requires an individual approach. Clients may also apply for counseling, conversation, guidance, or direction. Individual sessions predominate, however, over group sessions. Services are also provided to bullied children, for whom an anti-bullying training was established, where these children, including through the police and experts in martial arts, learn how to defend themselves at school (but only with ethical self-defense), and from a psychological perspective they receive help from a psychologist. In these therapies, the professional team also cooperates with the child’s family and environment and invites teachers with whom they discuss what to do next with these problem children. EEG – Biofeedback training is provided free of charge, through which the cerebral cortex is trained and thereby supports psychological development of children, concentration in lessons to better handle coursework, improved performance in school, and reduced aggressiveness. This training is non-violent, painless, and playful. If operated by a professional, it poses no risks, is not addictive, and has no side effects. The achieved effect is lasting, and applying this method is exceptionally effective and can significantly contribute to the quality of human life.
Civic association Prijatie actively participates in professional lectures, talks, and discussions focused on primary prevention of socio-pathological phenomena, aimed at pupils of primary and special schools, gymnasiums, secondary schools, and vocational schools in the Spišská Nová Ves district. In addition, the civic association has already organized 21 international conferences, held regularly. Despite low sponsor participation, it managed to gain cooperation with the professional public.
By establishing a low-threshold center, a number of sports activities were offered to youth, such as table tennis, football, dodgeball, exercise on fit balls, social games, training communication, handicrafts, painting, or work with clay. In the time of our survey (2013), 130 children were officially registered with whom experts, educators, and volunteers worked every day until eight in the evening, thus giving them quality free time. The goal of the low-threshold center was to prevent early smoking and consumption of alcohol among children in primary schools, and to prevent further socio-pathological phenomena. There were several rooms at the center where civic association Prijatie still operates for these activities. But because of lack of funds, these rooms had to be given up. As a replacement for these spaces, a rented family house in a village is available, where youth spend free time only in the yard, where they work with clay, sprays, and posters during favorable weather and when the weather is warm. Students or religious sisters help them with these activities. Financial resources of civic association Prijatie are very necessary especially for paying for premises where professional services are provided. Since these services are based on voluntarism and are free, they have only very few resources, such as contributions from the 2% tax and private funds.
Employees and Collaborators
The employees of civic association Prijatie consist of a circle of ten permanent members. During organizing seminars, trainings, and conferences, volunteers are mobilized to help, who already have a lot of experience and are a major contribution to the association. The number of these people is around thirty. In addition to these volunteers are university students specializing in social work, sociology, psychology, or pedagogy, mainly from places such as Spišská Nová Ves and Levoča. Students are very helpful and through this work they gain not only new experience but also necessary professional practice.
As with every non-governmental non-profit organization, civic association Prijatie also has its collaborators. They are mainly institutions, which include local government, universities, healthcare facilities, the Red Cross, and also the Regional Public Health Authority, with which it cooperates in assessing surveys and in regular reporting. It also cooperates with the media, regional television, radios, and by providing expert contributions to the press. It maintains regular cooperation with the church, from which religious sisters and visiting nuns are helpful to them in helping youth spiritually. Young priests have also been a significant contribution, as they served on the helpline. An important component of cooperation is also contact with social workers, with whom it has regular contact in situations where minor clients who misuse addictive substances need to be placed as soon as possible in protected environments and hospitalized in a healthcare or re-educational facility.
Priorities and Goals of the Civic Association Prijatie
Civic association Prijatie seeks to support young people in assuming responsibility for their health and to lead them toward a healthy lifestyle. Its philosophy is to help youth at the right time so they can know what is most beneficial for them and through gradual steps approach an optimal life. A very important goal for Prijatie is to reduce the level of misuse of legal and illegal addictive substances and other socio-pathological phenomena. They aim to intercept high-risk youth in time and guide them, and create suitable conditions for improvement of health by offering counseling up to crisis intervention. Civic association Prijatie also strives to create low-threshold conditions on the basis of field social work through talks and lectures, whose purpose is to make risk youth visible and overcome communication barriers, not to be afraid to confide and ask for help.
Civic association Prijatie has an extensive repertoire of services provided to its clients and achieves its set goals through qualified professional work. In carrying out professional work, civic association Prijatie also has to address its own difficulties, which are connected with its basic functioning. We found that at present (2013) it has insufficient financial resources, which are very important for running the organization. Since it provides its services to clients free of charge, it uses minimum resources consisting of 2% taxes, and this source of help is supplemented by private sources that are insufficient to solve its financial situation. Finances are especially important for paying for the premises in which activities and services for youth are carried out and for covering travel costs for field workers who help create various activities for clients and whose presence is very helpful to civic association. A major disadvantage we see is also the lack of sponsors who could at least partly relieve this financial situation. A worsening development of these shortages could threaten the existence of the association through exhaustion or loss of financial resources and in the future could lead to the complete disappearance of this civic association, which would be a major loss for society and especially for young people. Services for risky youth would then not be available, and this could lead to the spread of socio-pathological phenomena among youth, inappropriate use of free time, and behavioral disorders related to misuse of addictive substances. Therefore it is important for civic association that its work be supported by society, whether financially or through volunteering. Individual donors, members of the civic association, or volunteers could also partly ease their financial difficulties. Therefore we are convinced that civic association Prijatie should, in the future, enter public awareness and with the help of the city, obtain support for the realization of the services it offers.
Conclusion
The main aim of the survey was to map the activities of civic association Prijatie, which helps solve specific social problems of contemporary youth. During the survey we found that currently the cause of risky behavior of youth may be the influence of environment and social influences. Young people daily encounter negative influence in family, school, and free time, most often through mass media, mostly through social networks. To this are added problems in families whose members often have no oversight of children's free-time habits due to work obligations. Among youth there is thus a spread of ineffective or pathological ways of using free time, associated with using addictive substances and other socio-pathological phenomena.
At present, social work practice places greater attention on work with at-risk youth because it is the most vulnerable and is still searching for life patterns. It is a threatened group trying to orient itself in this complex world. For this reason it is important to pay it sufficient attention through non-governmental non-profit organizations. From the survey implemented, it was confirmed for us that the work of civic association Prijatie has its valuable place in society, bringing sufficient opportunities for coping with their difficulties. The care of members of the professional team has high potential to help current risk youth, and they are always ready to help them so that by gradual steps they move closer to achieving the goal. The wide selection of activities offered is the best prevention against failure and worsening of health and mental state. The time availability of services is unlimited, which attests to the devotion and cooperation of individual team members.
In conclusion, we want to draw attention to how important it is to care for contemporary youth and to attend to their needs so as to prevent the spread of ineffective or pathological use of free time and so that youth are motivated toward a healthy lifestyle and encouraged to take responsibility for their own health. We believe that through cooperation with non-governmental non-profit organizations, social workers, and the general public, we will achieve this.
Acknowledgement Through this channel, we would like to thank the head of civic association Prijatie, doc. PhDr. Mária Gažiová, PhD. and her professional team for providing an interview and space for our survey.
Author: Bc. Lenka MajerčákováThe author is a student of Social Work at the Research-Educational and Counseling Center in Spišská Nová Ves, Faculty of Social Sciences and Health Care, UKF in Nitra **Used literature:
KUVÍKOVÁ, H. 2004. Neziskové organizácie v Európskej únii. Banská Bystrica : EF UMB, 2004, 100 s. ISBN 80-8055-937-6. Občianske združenia. [online]. 2008, [cit. 2013-02-11]. Dostupné na internete: . ONDRUŠEK, D. 1998. Čo sú neziskové organizácie. In: ONDRUŠEK, D. a kol. Čítanka pre neziskové organizácie. Bratislava, Centrum prevencie a riešenia konfliktov, Partners for Democratic Change - Slovakia, 1998. ISBN 80-967890-5-8, s.11 – 12.
References: Občianske združenie Prijatie