When Gruia’s first job didn’t work out, he realised he needed help to start again. For seven months he had been working in a canteen but soon realised that he was being exploited. “It was not a good situation for me,” he says. “I was serving as well as cooking and was expected to do everything.”

The foster mother in whose care he had been placed as a four-year-old told him about Blythswood’s Daniel Centre which offers life-skills training and a safe place to stay to young men who have been brought up in care.

In the ten months that he has been there, Gruia feels that he has made significant progress. “The team here have taught me to take responsibility, to care for myself and how to work well.” Now the 19-year-old is employed as a fire warden, part of the security team at a shopping mall. He still keeps in touch regularly with the foster family in which he grew up in a village 40km from Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second city.

Asked about his ambitions, Gruia says he would like to return to cooking, despite his initial bad experience. “I would like to have my own business,” he says.

Dani Ciupe has been social worker at the Daniel Centre for more than 10 years. Since it opened 25 years ago, almost 200 boys have passed through the Centre and Dani reckons that about a third continue to keep in touch by occasional visits or calls. “As they get older, they appreciate that the care they received here really was a turning point in their lives.”