Social Services Resilience and Care Continuity 

Seminar
25-26 October 
Day 2 
 
Speaker Guidelines:
Building back better towards a resilient future
11:45 AM - 13:00 PM
 
 
The Session 
 
The closing session of the seminar will bring together representatives from the EP, research,
public authorities and people using social services to discuss the future of resilience
planning for social services.
Moderator: Alfonso Lara-Montero
1. Milan Brglez, MEP, Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, European
Parliament
2. Manuela Stanculescu, Senior Social Protection Specialist, World Bank
3. Simon Williams, Director of Social Care Improvement, Local Government
Association, United Kingdom
4. Hans Dubois, Research Manager, Eurofound [online]
5. Goran Kustura, Secretary-general, National Council of Disabled People's
Associations of Slovenia
6. Barbara Kobal Tomc, Vice-President, Social Chamber of Slovenia

Discussion questions:
The Moderator will ask three sets of questions to the speakers.
1st round of questions (same for each speaker); answers max. 3-4 minutes long:
- What are the most important challenges in what you think public social services
should focus to make them more resilient?
Then 2 specific questions per speaker:
Milan Brglez
- What role does/can the EP have to ensure that the national resilience plans also
invest in social services for people and communities?
- We talked about the monitoring group; what other policy mechanisms/initiatives does
the EP have to support/promote resilient social services locally?
Manuela Stanculescu
- How do you think the national government could help local authorities develop more
resilient social services?
- What type of conditionality is needed to ensure that funds are invested in modern
community based rather than large residential services?
Simon Williams
- What could the national government do to help local authorities have more resilient
social services?
- What approach does the Local Government Association recommend to public
authorities to make social services and the population groups that rely on them more
resilient?

Hans Dubois
- Based on your research work, how can the long-term care sector transform to be
more resilient towards future crises?
- How might the European Care Strategy be used as a tool for more resilient social
care systems?
Goran Kustura
- From the perspective of the National Council of Disabled People's Associations of
Slovenia, what systemic solutions need to be made in social services to improve the
resilience of people with disabilities in Slovenia?
Let me preface my answer by saying that while it’s important that resilience has been
increasingly recognized as a relational product rather than an individual trait, the disability
movement and critical disability studies are challenging normative ideas and resilience
remains a contested concept. Some might in fact argue that traditional notions of resilience
have often contributed to discrimination and marginalization or at the very least helped
perpetuate negative disability stereotypes such as the heroization of persons with
disabilities, and that insufficient attention has been paid to the cultural contexts in which
concepts of health and wellbeing are constructed.
Let us also remind ourselves that we’re applying the social model of disability to our analysis
which moves the focus away from impairment – the functional limitation within the individual
-to disability as the result of a disabling environment, barriers, attitudes and cultures.
Therefore the social construction of resilience considers individual attributes of resilience
socially situated and culturally mediated and we should be mindful that the notions of what it
means to be resilient are underpinned by our normative expectations. The disability
movement operates with a slightly different model of resilience in that it doesn’t affirm
‘cultural adherence’ but rather calls for a change to disabling society.
This is an additionally salient point in post-socialist countries like Slovenia, which upon
independence inherited a very institution-centered, bureaucratic system of social services
and have since been attempting to marry it to a human rights based, user-oriented approach
to disability with varying results. It is therefore not surprising that the processes of
deinstitutionalization and transition to community-based living have been slow and even one
of the most generous personal assistance systems, while certainly improving the quality of
lives, has not necessarily empowered persons with disabilities.
There is an inherent contradiction in the system, a worrying level of discrepancy between the
declarative and the actual state of affairs, this applies to the entire Eastern Europe, and a
propensity for the performative rather than substantive.
In order to improve the resilience of persons with disabilities and in fact their overall
wellbeing, we need to reframe and reimagine the sector in a more holistic way and align it
with the human rights based approach on local and national levels rather than on the
international level only (CRPD). And pending a macrosystem overhaul, address the
mesosystem, change attitudes and reform institutions.

- Do you think that EU funding, such as the Recovery and Resilience Facility, may be
helpful in improving the lives of people with disabilities? If so, why and how?
I do. With its emphasis on the green and digital transitions the RRF has made it possible to
address the issue of internet and TV accessibility in this country, which unlike the
accessibility of the built environment had largely been ignored and has only became
prominent with the EU Web Accessibility Directive and its (albeit unambitious) transposition
into national law.
Funding has been made available for projects that will improve web accessibility and
introduce a process of certification thereof as well as projects aimed at developing
applications for speech recognition and speech to text technologies that promise to bring us
real time closed captioning of live programming and possibly even dictation, none of this has
been available in the Slovenian language.

Barbara Kobal Tomc

- How do you think the national government could help social service providers and
centres for social work develop more resilient social services?
- How do you think that EU funds should be used to ensure that they are invested in
modernising and promoting community-based social care and services?

Session guidelines:

 Please prepare speaking points based on the questions above.

 The audience will be composed of mostly directors/managers from the social
services departments of local and regional authorities.
 On the day, please arrive at the stage in the plenary room at 11:30 so that we can fit
you with a microphone before the plenary session begins

 Your intervention should be in English or Slovenian. There will be interpretation

between Slovenian and English for the delegates.
 Please send a short statement (1-2 pages) with answers to these questions (may be
bullet points) by 20 October to help the interpreters for the event prepare for the
session.