Tonuso is a not-for-profit organization in Brussels that has been providing guidance to children and families since 1990. It operates several residential and day facilities for nearly 150 children between ages 3-21 who are subject to youth protection laws. Tonuso aims to provide quality, personalized support across all areas of children's lives using communication, systemic, and contextual counseling approaches. It employs over 80 staff supporting around 130 young people, making it one of the largest youth assistance organizations in Brussels.

1. The organisation
Tonuso is a government funded not-for-profit organization.
Started in 1990 and constantly growing since, ‘Tonuso’ (the name means ‘resilience’
in Esperanto) does today the guidance of 149 children and youngsters (and supports
their families) in and around Brussels. Those children and youngsters are all subject
of the Flemish ‘Special Youth Assistance’-act or the Belgian ‘Child Protection Law’.
We aim to give a qualitative and differentiated help to children and their families. We
try to organize our help in a way integrating all areas of the family/children’s life.
Tonuso uses the principles of the communication-, systemic- and contextual theories
to build a (better) future for the children we guide. Working with the context of the
children or creating a new context is one of the important issues in our guidance.
Tonuso organizes three residential care facilities (‘Atomix’ for 15 children between 3
and 18 years old, ‘De Plan-Aid’ for 15 girls from 12-20 years old, and ‘Het Boy-Kot’
for 15 boys from 14-20 years old), three day-care centres (‘Het Vlot’ Jette; ‘Het Vlot’
Anderlecht and ‘De Schuit’, each for 10 children between 6 and 18 years old), a
home based guidance centre (‘De Pont’ guidance at home for 48 children between
0-20 years old), and centre for guided ‘living alone’ (‘De Sloep’ for 16 youngsters
between 17 and 21 years old). Tonuso also organizes a project for short-term
intensive guidance ‘De Pit’, where 10 youngsters between 14 and 18 years are
guided for a limited period of 6 months.
In total, Tonuso counts over 80 staff members and is one the largest facilities for
“special youth assistance” in the Brussels area supporting about 130 youngsters.
Target group within the organisation
As Tonuso is mainly organised for residential care and home based guidance two
different target groups are installed: one in the residential care and one in the home
based guidance. The aim is to have between 10 and 20 youngsters involved in the
pilot.
Youngsters from both residential settings an ambulant settings will be involved.
Organisation goals with regards to the target group
As the organisation is mainly focusing on youngsters, the organisation goals are also
mainly concerning about the youngsters:
“We aim to give a qualitative and differentiated help to children and their
families. We try to organize our help in a way integrating all areas of the family/
children’s life. Tonuso uses the principles of the communication-, systemic- and
contextual theories to build a (better) future for the children we guide. Working
with the context of the children or creating a new context is one of the important
issues in our guidance.”

2. Pilot goals
The pilot goals are in line with the TONUSO and INCLUSO goals:
In general:
- to support social inclusion
- to find a way to get a trusted relationship with counselling organisation
- to find out how we can increase the social networks for marginalized people
We start with the general goals and we will define the Incluso goals in the next
paragraph.
The general Goals of our organization are the goals that we achieve in usual way of
working. For the Incluso project we will support this with Ict and social software to
achieve the same goals.