The Villaggio della Gioia is a valid reception facility
Three family homes with as many couples and a long experience in welcoming children e people in difficulty. A building with six apartments and another, specular, yet to be built, to build another seven. In the center, a garden where i children they play every day after school. And the Village of Joy, a reception facility for families on the outskirts of Forlì, in the heart of Romagna. It was built by the Pope John XXIII community. Today it hosts over fifty people.
The Villaggio della Gioia is a structure where you learn to become parents and where children can stay with mum and dad even in times of difficulty.
The Villaggio della Gioia offers a different approach
In Italy there are about 30 thousand children and adolescents who live outside their family of origin. And when the serenity of the family and the child is put at risk by situations of difficulty or discomfort, even temporary, the State usually uses the institution of family custody.
The custody provides for the taking in custody of the child by foster families until the parents have resolved their problem with the help of social services. It is a measure that protect the little one, in some cases necessary and inevitable. But the separation remains a major trauma.
La Apg23, founded by Don Oreste Benzi in 1968 and which since 1973 has been a reality inreception of minors in foster care he built this small village. The Villaggio della Gioia, inaugurated in 2009, offers a new and different approach. Welcoming whole households and help them all together, avoiding when possible the tearing of the separation.
A project, whose validity was sanctioned by the juvenile court of Bologna
The juvenile court of Bologna sanctioned the validity of this project when, for the first time in Italian history, it entrusted the Village of Joy an entire family unit. It was a very young couple and already with a small child, who was in a difficult personal and working situation.
After a careful analysis, the judges fielded a series of aids for the newborn family unit, including placement within the Forlì village.
The child, despite entrusting him to social services, has never left mom and dad who moved into one of the apartments of the structure.
