This book is based on a fieldwork intensive, EU funded project, aimed at sustaining the empowerment processes of career guidance practitioners by developing their awareness and use of their individual, organizational and networking resources. The field work activity was carried out in three different national contexts: Italy, Bulgaria and Switzerland, and based on a creative methodological approach called Participative and Appreciative Action and Reflection (PAAR). The contributions cover a wide range of intertwined subjects. These include (a) deep reflection on life long career guidance (LLCG) systems and processes in the three national contexts involved, (b) the challenges of managing PAAR projects in organisations (c) the role of a participative and appreciative approaches in facilitating a positive shift from professionals inside welfare state institutions, to a more counselling oriented mission (d) how to build up an appreciative memory that is a way of representing experience and creating space for relationships so that they remain stable over time (e) reflection on what may happen to learning processes if the contexts in which the empowerment practices are implemented happen through a virtual environment such as a blog or a social network. The Editors are all experienced researchers and practitioners working if the field of facilitation, life long career guidance, counselling, reflective learning and social innovation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

This book is based on a fieldwork intensive, EU funded project, aimed at sustaining the empowerment processes of career guidance practitioners by developing their awareness and use of their individual, organizational and networking resources. The field work activity was carried out in three different national contexts: Italy, Bulgaria and Switzerland, and based on a creative methodological approach called Participative and Appreciative Action and Reflection (PAAR). The contributions cover a wide range of intertwined subjects. These include (a) deep reflection on life long career guidance (LLCG) systems and processes in the three national contexts involved, (b) the challenges of managing PAAR projects in organisations (c) the role of a participative and appreciative approaches in facilitating a positive shift from professionals inside welfare state institutions, to a more counselling oriented mission (d) how to build up an appreciative memory that is a way of representing experience and creating space for relationships so that they remain stable over time (e) reflection on what may happen to learning processes if the contexts in which the empowerment practices are implemented happen through a virtual environment such as a blog or a social network. The Editors are all experienced researchers and practitioners working if the field of facilitation, life long career guidance, counselling, reflective learning and social innovation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

INSTITUTIONS FOR CHILDREN IN BULGARIA This text studies psychological and social factors that have led many parents to separate from their children placing voluntarily them in institutional care in Bulgaria during the communist regime. Like in all Soviet block countries the child welfare system was built according to the communist ideology of the state intervening in the family. This legacy presents a problem in the current efforts of transforming the child welfare system from institutional to community one. The study focuses on the relationship between mothers' experience in childhood as reflected in their attachment style and mental representations, and their choice of different type of care for their own children (institutional, weekly and day care). The participants completed attachment style measures and wrote descriptions of their parents. Mothers who used institutional care for their children were the least secure of the three groups, their mental representations were the most negative, and most of them were raised in institutions. Mothers who used weekly care presented mental representations that were the least conceptually complex. Policy implications were discussed.