TOY to Share, Play to Care is a two-year project (January 2019 – January 2021) that builds on previous work undertaken by International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI), a Netherlands-based non-governmental organization. Specifically, it follows upon the project TOY for Inclusion, 2017-2019.

The TOY to Share, Play to Care consortium comprises ten partner organizations based in nine European countries.

The initial TOY for Inclusion project developed and piloted Play Hubs, i.e., low-threshold, community-based, and informal early childhood spaces open to young children, their families, and community members of local Roma communities. Play Hubs offer toys for borrowing (toy libraries), stimulating activities for young children, opportunities for inter-generational encounters, and generally safe and welcoming spaces for everybody.

The follow-up project TOY to Share, Play to Care takes the existing Play Hubs as its starting point and builds on their experiences in order to scale up the model.

The project design includes a comprehensive data collection, monitoring, and evaluation framework to enable shared learning from project experiences. The following research questions were explored in this report using a qualitative methodology for data collection and analysis.

1. What does impact/making a difference mean to your locality in relation to inclusive early years community initiatives i.e., this project? How do you know? For whom?
2. What do you envisage will help you make a difference to your locality in relation to inclusive early years community initiatives?
3. What do you envisage will make it difficult to make a difference in relation to inclusive early years community initiatives?