At a minimum, what does a family need?

Need of PCSWs

The research into the Flemish reference budgets started in 2006 when a group of PCSWs in Campine and Limburg approached Thomas More with the request to conduct research into the minimum income a family needs to make ends meet. The PCSWs indicated a need for a guideline for assessing living situations in function of human dignity. Indeed, a survey of their own on this subject revealed large differences.

Developing reference budgets

For three years, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the college and other scientific experts worked on the development of Flemish reference budgets (Storms & Van den Bosch, 2009). After the Flemish ones came the Belgian reference budgets (Van Thielen et al., 2010) and some time later a peer review was organized in the Walloon parliament by the European Commission on reference budgets as an instrument to help shape minimum income protection in Europe (Storms, 2010).