Tomas Announces Labour Ministry's New Programme to Help Single Parents

Bratislava, 20 October (TASR) - The Labour, Social Affairs and the Family Ministry is launching a project focused on supporting single parents, the aim of which is to help this group of people stand on their own two feet in a new situation, Labour Minister Erik Tomas (Voice-SD) announced at a news conference on Monday. Single parents should now be helped to deal with their issues by professionals in comprehensive aid counselling centres. "It rarely happens, but we have brought the know-how and experience from organisations helping single parents into the state system," explained the minister. "We have three partners in this project: 'One Parent' association, the 'Sun Center' organisation, and the 'Mymamy' [We Mothers] organisation," said Tomas. The project consists of a network of 46 comprehensive aid counselling centres that the ministry has set up across Slovakia. "We'll have these employees in these counselling centres - a psychologist, a lawyer, an economist and a social worker. Two new posts will be added: a personal experience guide and then a case manager," said Tomas. These guides should receive single parents and share their personal experience of the given situation with them. At the same time, they should motivate them to join the project. The role of case managers will be to take on a specific single parent and set up a specific programme to resolve his/her issues. The condition for providing the aid will be that single parents should apply for the project voluntarily. "On the one hand, we want these single parents to show their efforts to improve their situation in life, and on the other hand, we want to prevent the project and programme from being misused," explained Tomas, who believes that the new programme will be functional as of February 2026. ko/df