By Armen Gakavian

Like most Armenians, I feel a sense of pride when I read about a famous person who is Armenian, or an Armenian product winning an award for excellence.
I feel a similar sense of pride when I hear about Mission Armenia, Armenia’s largest non-government organization (NGO), ‘exporting’ its social welfare and development methods to other countries of the Former Soviet Union.

Mission Armenia’s unique combination of centre-based and home-based care for the aged has long been recognized as a model to emulate. Over the past three years, Mission Armenia has been invited to send teams to various East European countries to explain their model and provide insights into how this model can be adopted in other parts of the former communist world.

More recently, in May 2004, two of Mission Armenia’s young social work experts, Anna Voskanyan and Gayane Asatryan, visited Georgia to conduct a series of workshops and consultations for NGOs.

The objective of the workshops was to help Georgian NGOs to design community-based services for older people – services that give the elderly a greater say in decisions that affect them. The workshops touched on such issues as stereotypes about ageing and the aged, age discrimination, issues of ageing in Georgia, the role of NGOs in empowering older people and resources needed to achieve improvements in the quality of the elderly lives.

The nature of aged care is different in a country like Armenia to that of a western country like Australia. In the Western world, institutionalised care through nursing homes and retirement villages is an accepted model of aged care. In countries like Armenia, where community support systems are strong and the concept of extended family still survives, home-based care makes more sense. Therefore, as Anna Voskanyan emphasized in her workshop, “social policies in Former Soviet countries are best developed within the context of the local community and then submitted to the government for approval. In Mission Armenia’s experience, this down-up process of policy making has proven to be much more effective since it better reflects the community’s needs.”

The beauty of home-based and centre-based aged care is that it encourages social integration rather than segregation – the elderly feel themselves to be normal members of society, and not outcasts in their own country. This is particularly important in a society where interpersonal relationships are so valued.

* Adapted from http://www.mission.am/news_events/.
This article was first published in Sydney’s Armenia Weekly, in November 2004.