There is, in Ungheni district, a social service that is little talked about, yet that says a great deal about how a country treats its most vulnerable people. In Sculeni lies one of the eight «community homes» for people with severe intellectual disabilities in the Republic of Moldova — small homes in the community, conceived as an alternative to the large institutions of old. And in June, the Sculeni home quietly appeared on the agenda of a European project.
According to Keystone Moldova, the organisation that coordinates the network, from 9 to 12 June 2026 the staff of the eight community homes went through training workshops on themes that show how delicate their work is: ethics and the protection of beneficiaries’ rights in limit situations, person-centred case management, crisis intervention and conflict de-escalation, handling difficult behaviour without violence. The reform, in other words, is not only about renovated walls, but also about the quality of care.
What a «community home» is
The idea is simple and, at the same time, revolutionary for a system used to vast institutions. Instead of a psychoneurological institution with hundreds of people, the state moves the beneficiaries into ordinary homes, in the middle of a village or a town, where a few live — usually six to eight — with the permanent support of specialised staff. The aim is not just shelter, but life: people cook, go out into the community, are known by their neighbours, regain a fragment of normality that a large institution can never give.
This shift — from institution to community — is called deinstitutionalisation and has been, for years now, Moldova’s official direction of reform, aligned with the standards of the United Nations.
The European project behind it
The Sculeni home is part of a cross-border project called «Cross-border Inclusive Communities» (code ROMD00297), funded by the European Union through the Interreg Romania–Republic of Moldova programme. The total budget is about EUR 1.6 million, and the project, launched in the autumn of 2025, lasts two years. It is implemented by Keystone Moldova together with the «Alături de Voi» Foundation from Iași.
Concretely, the project rehabilitates and modernises 12 social buildings in Moldova — eight community homes for people with severe intellectual disabilities (in Mitoc, Chirca, Hansca, Ciulucani, Voloave, Fălești, Sculeni and Nisporeni) and four protected dwellings — to which a day centre in Iași is added. Sculeni thus enters a network that links several districts of Moldova to a partner in Romania.
The reform in figures — and how slowly it moves
To grasp the stakes, the figures help. In the Republic of Moldova there live about 160,000 people with disabilities — 6.7% of the population — of whom 11,400 are children, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. And about 1,700 people with mental disabilities are still in six large residential institutions, where the average length of stay reaches nearly ten years in the psychoneurological ones.
Against this number, the pace of reform is discouragingly slow: from 2018 to now, only some 143 people have been moved out of institutions and into about 30 community homes and protected dwellings, the data of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection show. In other words, every new home — including the one in Sculeni — matters enormously, because the alternative, the large institution, still houses thousands of people.
Locally, the scale of the phenomenon is visible indirectly: in Ungheni district, about 2,921 people received a disability pension at the start of 2025 (down from 3,793 in 2017, for a general condition). Not all have intellectual disabilities — it is merely a measure of how many people in Ungheni live, in one form or another, with a disability.
What we do not yet know about the Sculeni home
The public data stop here, for now. It is not publicly known when the Sculeni community home opened, how many beneficiaries it has or what stage its rehabilitation is at under the current project — information that, out of respect for the privacy of the people who live there, should not be sought at the level of the individual, but requested from the institutions. These are details that Keystone Moldova, the local authorities in Sculeni and the National Social Assistance Agency can provide, and Triunghi.md will follow up on them.
The details of the training workshops (9–12 June 2026) come from Keystone Moldova’s public communication; the data on the ROMD00297 project (budget, partners, list of buildings) from the organisation’s official page. The figures on people with disabilities and residential institutions belong to the National Bureau of Statistics, and the progress of deinstitutionalisation to the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection; the number of disability pensioners in Ungheni district comes from CNAS data processed by the BNS. The figure «over 1,500 beneficiaries» is an estimate by Keystone Moldova. The concrete data on the Sculeni community home (opening, beneficiaries, stage of rehabilitation) are not public at the time of writing and were not estimated; as of publication, Triunghi.md had not obtained a reaction from Keystone Moldova, the Sculeni authorities or ANAS.