Problem addressed

A child at risk of dropping out of school may simultaneously need educational support, medical care, and social assistance. An elderly person living alone may need care, medical monitoring, and social support all at once. A person with disabilities needs not just a financial benefit, but access to healthcare, rehabilitation, counselling, and community integration. Yet public systems are organised by domain, and vulnerable people are left to navigate different institutions on their own.
This is the daily reality for millions of people in rural Romania. Poverty in rural communities is not a single problem — it is multiple, overlapping deprivations: poor health, low school attendance, inadequate housing, absence of identity documents, lack of material resources, and exclusion from social life. Elderly people, Roma communities, children, young people, persons with disabilities, and their families face all of these at once. Vulnerabilities are geographically concentrated in isolated rural areas where public services are scarce, institutions are fragmented, and the people who need help the most are the least likely to find it.
No single institution, working alone, can address interconnected needs. Fragmented interventions reach only part of the person and solve only part of the problem. What is needed is a shift — from institutions working in silos to professionals working together, from standardised bureaucratic responses to support built around each person's real situation. SCI2000 was designed to make that shift happen.

Innovative solution

The project "Providing Integrated Services in Rural Communities — Facilitating Access of Vulnerable Persons to Efficient and Quality Basic Services" (PIDS/586/PO4/339395) addresses this systemic gap through the creation of 2,000 Integrated Community Teams (ICTs) in the most marginalized rural localities, implemented from January 2025 to December 2029 and co-financed by the European Social Fund Plus through the Inclusion and Social Dignity Programme 2021–2027.
The ICTs are multidisciplinary teams composed of social workers and social assistance technicians, community health nurses and health mediators, school counselors, school mediators, speech therapists, and support teachers, supplemented — depending on the results of the social diagnosis — by elderly care workers, psychologists, social economy specialists, youth workers, and community development facilitators. This integrated service delivery model is built on a bottom-up needs identification mechanism: each team first conducts a community social diagnosis, then develops individualized intervention plans, and delivers ongoing, personalized support directly to vulnerable persons, including through home visits.
The project is led by the Ministry of Labour, Family, Youth and Social Solidarity, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of Health, and the National Agency for Payments and Social Inspection — a four-ministry institutional architecture that ensures coordination across all relevant public domains. County-level Support and Supervision Units provide technical, methodological, and operational support to the ICTs, creating a three-tier governance structure from local to national level. 

Key results and benefits

The project targets 450,000 vulnerable persons across 2,000 rural administrative units who will gain improved access to social, health, and educational services — including 40,500 Roma persons. A total of 10,000 professionals will be deployed across the 2,000 communities, of whom 6,373 will obtain a formal qualification, contributing directly to raising the quality of services offered to vulnerable persons in rural communities. Additionally, 2,000 community spaces will be renovated and equipped, and 2,000 approved and funded action plans will be developed, one for each locality.
Progress toward the main result is structured in verified milestones: 25,000 vulnerable persons served by December 2026; 75,000 by June 2027; 150,000 by December 2027; 225,000 by June 2028; 300,000 by December 2028; and the full 450,000 by project end. The 149,335 annual users of new or modernized social assistance units represent the sustained institutional legacy of the investment. Services delivered span social assistance (including the minimum social assistance package), community healthcare, educational support, housing improvement packages, food support for school-age children, and referral to employment services — addressing the full spectrum of multiple vulnerabilities identified through the social diagnosis.
The total project value is approximately 815 million euros, making this one of the largest social inclusion investments in Romania's post-accession history. The results are not project-bound: through the collaboration protocols signed with all 2,000 local authorities, each municipality assumes — via local council decision — the continuation of the integrated community team and its premises for a minimum of 5 years after project completion.

So far, the project has achieved the following results:

• 1,555 collaboration protocols signed with rural local public administrations 
• 101 collaboration protocols currently in the signing process
• 69 letters of intent submitted by local public administrations

The project builds on a previous initiative, which delivered the following main results:

• 127 integrated community teams operational at local level
• 513 specialists involved (159 in social services, 175 in education, 179 in healthcare)
• 40 county-level support and coordination teams

Potential for mainstreaming

The project's design explicitly incorporates activities during implementation that lead to the transferability of results to other target groups, sectors, and territorial levels. At the methodological level, the project updates the Methodological Package for Integrated Community Services and develops a national online application for reporting, validating, and monitoring the activity of integrated community teams at both local and county level, interoperable with other relevant databases. A new occupational standard for "integrated community services expert" will be developed based on the experience of ICT members, providing a replicable qualification framework for the entire sector.

Sustainability is structurally embedded: the 2,000 local authorities sign collaboration protocols and assume, through local council decisions, the continuation of the ICT and its dedicated space after the project ends. The legislative and institutional framework — including the obligation of local public administration authorities to provide the minimum social assistance package and ensures that what the project builds becomes a permanent component of the Romanian welfare system, not a temporary initiative. The inter-institutional collaboration mechanism and the integrated intervention procedures will be transferred to other communities beyond the 2,000 selected, through non-competitive projects implemented by the applicant and its partners. On the basis of proposals to amend existing legislation, the ministries involved will take the necessary steps to improve the legal framework to allow multiplication of this model, in line with the commitments assumed.