A Project Report

On

Advocacy, Research and Training –

Interviewing Care Leavers with Udayan Care

Submitted by:

Harshad Mohod – 19B

Social Awareness Program (SAP)

Under the guidance of

Lalit Kumar – Udayan Care

Master In Business Administration

Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi

Batch: 2021-2023
Acknowledgement
This project consumed huge amount of work, research, and dedication. Still, its implementation
would not have been possible if I did not have a support of many individuals and organizations.
Therefore, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all of them. First, I am thankful to
Udayan Care as an organization for their institutional and logistical support and for providing
necessary guidance concerning the project’s implementation. I am also grateful to Mr. Lalit
Kumar & Ms. Aditi Shrivastava for providing expertise, and technical support in the
implementation. Without their superior knowledge and experience, the project would have
lacked in quality of outcomes, and thus their support has been essential. I would like to express
my sincere thanks towards other volunteers who devoted their time and knowledge in the
implementation of this project. Furthermore, I express my gratitude towards my family and my
colleagues for their kind co-operation and encouragement which helped me in completion of this
project.
Work Summary

Our work involved understanding the network of Child Care Institutions (CCIs) in
India, the various rules and regulations concerning it through secondary research.
We also learned about Udayan Care and Its various Programs by going through
the Annual Report (2019-20) and gained an understanding of the NGO and its
operation, previous work done and policies ( CPP, CPS, JJA-2015 etc.). We
engaged with mentors and guides from Udayan Care got to know about Udayan
Ghar, Alternative Care, Aftercare and the care leavers- why they need special
attention. We were working specifically with the Advocacy and Research (A.R.T)
department of Udayan care and got to know how it explores different aspects of
policies and practices around Alternative Care for children and youth through
research, training, seminars, publications, consultations and workshops. And
helps in bringing necessary reforms in these policies for more effective results.
The most important aspect of our work though was to understand YERS - Youth
Emotional Resiliency Scale which intends to measure the resilience of young
people as they were about to disengage from care, and use it to assess the care
leavers. This involved coordinating with various POCs to schedule interviews in
which we interacted one on one with care leavers and asked them several
 questions about their life to gather important data about the youth’s current state
of being.

Background of the Work

Brief Profile of the NGO

Work allocated (Objectives and Contribution)

Process followed to complete the work

Resiliency is a concept that refers to a person's healthy, adaptive, or integrated productive
functioning throughout time in the aftermath of adversity. Vulnerability and resilience are both
addressed in resilience theory (or protective factors).
Resilience as an outcome: When a person is able to display positive adaptation despite
substantial hardship, they are said to be "resilient" or "having resilience." Well-being,
psychological functioning, intellectual competency, economic independence, and so on are all
examples of resilience.
Resilience as a process: refers to the factors that allow some people to overcome adversity, and
includes the ones already mentioned: sense of coherence, learnt resourcefulness, and so on.
Resilience:
1. is an individuals' ability to find psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that help
them establish and maintain their well-being.
2. is their ability to negotiate for these resources to be delivered and experienced in culturally
meaningful ways on an individual and community level.
Thus, it is an individuals' abilities to locate and mobilize (or, in his words, to navigate to and
bargain for) resources in the social context. Resilience is thus found not within individuals or
surroundings, but rather at the interface between both, i.e., in the person-in-environment.
Children and teenagers growing up in Alternative Care with early childhood adversities, trauma,
attachment and trust issues require resiliency to help them get successful in life and overcome
these challenges. Care Leavers have numerous problems throughout their transition period, and
their emerging adulthood (18 to 21 years) is spent adjusting to the new environment after leaving
their childcare settings and establishing themselves as self-sufficient individuals. Resilience is
especially important during this time.
Care Leavers are young people aged 18 and up who have lived in out-of-home care settings as
children, primarily Child Care Institutions in India, and have experienced childhood trauma. In a
study with Care Leavers conducted by Udayan Care in 2019,1 it was discovered that over 61
percent of CLs experienced recurring emotional distress, that 78 percent of CLs did not seek
professional help for emotional distress, and that transitioning out of care had a negative impact
on CLs' emotional well-being. It also revealed that female CLs experience a more negative
impact on their emotional wellness than male CLs, that access to mental health services
decreases throughout transition, and that the number of CLs seeking professional mental health
care is extremely low.
This is acceptable, especially given the fact that the majority of children in alternative care have
come from broken families and homes, poverty, orphanhood, abuse, and neglect.
Udayan Care's AOP seeks to coach and guide these young people during their transition time in
order to make it as seamless and supportive as possible. Supporting kids in developing resiliency
is a vital programming intervention that helps them achieve their overall developmental goals of
being self-sufficient and independent.

Development of YERS:
Prof. Adrian D. Van Breda, Department of Social Work, University of Johannesburg, South
Africa, created the original version. The scale was created in 2012 as part of a wider study on
young people transitioning from residential care to self-sufficiency. It was created as part of an
ongoing longitudinal study on care-leaving to assess young people's resilience as they
approached disengagement from care and to predict favorable transitional outcomes at annual
intervals thereafter. 2015 (Van Breda & Dickens).
Given CLs' high vulnerability, Udayan Care created this customized YERS as a reliable
instrument for measuring their resiliency and effectively planning for its improvement.
The YERS is a useful instrument for social service workers to measure and analyze young
people's resilience, allowing them to identify the AOP youth's specific strengths. It can assist in
identifying youth who are particularly susceptible and require further psychosocial support. It
can also be used to assess the impact of AOP interventions on the development paths of the
youth.
In 2020, Udayan Care collaborated with Prof Breda to adapt the scale for usage in India and
received authorization to deploy it with its Care Leavers.
About scoring:
This section contains instructions for manually scoring the entire YERS (including the questions
on young people ready to leave foster care).
1. A new column called 'reverse score' has been added. Items with an asterisk should be
scored backwards, thus 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 remains 3, 2 becomes 4, and 1
becomes 5.
2. A new column called 'IMI' has been added. The Impression Management Index is a
validated scale that measures social desirability responses. Items highlighted with an
asterisk contribute to a second scale called the Impression Management Index (Van
Breda & Potgieter, 2007).
To manually score the YERS, follow these steps for each subscale:
1. Score the elements in reverse order, so that 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 remains 3, 2
becomes 4, and 1 becomes 5.
2. Add up the scores for each individual's responses.
3. It's fine if someone skips one or two questions, but after more than a couple of responses
are skipped, your confidence in the final score diminishes, and you should avoid scoring
that subscale.
4. Subtract the total from the number of questions answered correctly.
5. Deduct one from the total.
6. Multiply the result by 25 to produce a percentage score (i.e., the scores might now range
from 0 to 100).
7. A higher score suggests greater resilience in that construct, while a lower score indicates
less resilience in that construct.
To manually generate composite YERS scores, perform the following steps for each domain:
1. The domains are the YERS questionnaire's key headings, such as
 Relationships.
 Social environment (in the questionnaire, referred to as "my position")
  Interactions (sometimes known as "my interactions with the outside world")
 Personal
 In-care ('feelings about Girls and Boys Town')
2. Add the final scores for each of the constructs in each domain (for example, in
relationships, the scores for family, friends, school (if they are in school), community,
role models, and lovers) (if they are in a love relationship).
3. Take the sum and divide it by the number of subscales they finished.
4. For that domain, a composite score (measured as a 0-100 percentage) is generated.
5. You may also take the average of all the composite scores to generate the 'Global
Resilience' score, which combines all of the YERS components.
To manually compute the IMI score, follow these steps:
1. There are ten items in the IMI. 7 things are highlighted with an asterisk (*), while 3 are
marked with an asterisk (**).
2. Responses of ‘strongly disagree' or 'disagree' are scored 1 for the 7 items listed with an
Asterisk, while all other responses are rated 0.
3. Replies of 'strongly agree' or 'agree' are scored 1 for the three items marked with **,
while all other responses are rated 0.
4. Add the ten scores together.
5. To acquire an IMI Index score that ranges from 0 to 100, multiply by 100.
6. According to the IMI's validation, a score of more than 70% indicates impression
management, which could indicate that the YERS responses aren't a real reflection of the
respondent's self-perception. They may be portraying themselves in a more favorable
light than they are.
Following the above instructions, we coordinated with various after care facilities in Delhi
and Hyderabad to schedule meetings with the youths and surveyed them to understand their
well-being and held one on one interviews with the care leavers to understand their
requirements and grade them on a scale of 1-5 depending on the questions and their
responses. The questions revolved around their relationships with their birth families, with
Udayan Care, school/workplace relationships, their financial situation, activities they were
involved in, their coping skills, teamwork skills, their personal feelings, expectations about
themselves, how they dealt with stressful situations, their experiences with the staff and peers
 at Udayan Care, etc. Then, we calculated the scores for individual domains like relationships,
personal interaction, financial situations, etc. Each domain had a sub-scale and the composite
score was calculated by taking the weighted average of each sub-scale score. Following this,
we calculated the Global Resilience score which was the weighted average of all the
domains. There was also a separate section for IMI – Impression Management Index which
measured whether the youth was giving socially desirable responses or not.
We then collected all the interviews and created a google drive to share with the employees
of the Udayan Care. We also gave a presentation about our experiences and work with
Udayan Care.

Result

Benefit to NGO and Society