$2 Million Grant Launches Winner’s Family Coaching Project

The doors to a welcoming, innovative family counseling initiative opened in early February in a pedestrian shopping mall in Santa Monica, CA, thanks to a $2 million grant given to a Changemakers competition winner.

The Family Commons offers a wide range of family support programs and therapy in a comfortable, easily accessible environment that practically obliterates the stigma and intimidation many people associate with mental health care.

“We’re looking to serve families deciding to have children through those with kids in their teenage years. Any family is welcome,” said Director Dr. Diane Flannery.

The grand opening attracted media attention from the CNN website as well as Los Angeles TV and newspapers, and featured a link between a "mood beacon" in the Family Commons window and the lights on the ferris wheel on Santa Monica's famed pier.

From one-on-one family coaching to group classes and workshops including martial arts classes for kids run by mental health counselors, The Family Commons will help individuals and families be supported in the kinds of daily challenges that often go unaddressed and become exacerbated.

The idea was in its pilot phase when Flannery and her colleagues at UCLA’s Semel Institute Global Center for Children and Families submitted it into Changemakers’ Disruptive Innovations in Health Care competition. The project so impressed the competition’s sponsor, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that the foundation committed $2 million to enable it to get off the ground and eventually expand.

“The competition put us in front of Robert Wood Johnson, it raised our profile in the community, and even within UCLA – we got the development department’s attention after winning,” said Flannery. “I’m not sure we’d be we are today without our involvement on Changemakers.”

In particular, the competition’s open-source platform offered unexpected benefits. Putting the idea out for the public to scrutinize made Flannery and her colleagues feel a bit vulnerable, but also required them to engage in a constructive dialogue.

“The rigor of having to go through the process, of putting our idea out to the world was really good for us,” Flannery explained. “The people that commented on our idea really helped.”

“We had one moment where we said, what if someone steals our idea?” said Senior Writer Dr. Terry Lowe. “But we knew we were in the best position to do it the way we were doing it and if someone wanted to do something somewhat similar, well, that would just benefit more people.”

The Family Commons aims to fill the gaps in family support that typically exist in communities today. Research shows that there are plenty of tools and answers for parents facing the predictable stages of family life and child development, but that these resources rarely make it into the hands of the parents who need them.  Clinical psychotherapy can be expensive, stigmatized or too time-consuming; self-help books too generalized.

The Family Commons is designed to take the mystery out of support and to offer targeted and personalized assistance that fits with parents’ and kids’ needs and schedules.

Opening December 12thh, the operation will offer 12 days of free services as an introduction to the community. It will have its official Grand Opening on February 4th. Flannery hopes many more will open up in short order.

“We’re very excited,” she said. “We’re in the final stages of getting everything ready to be able to open the doors and offer the services we’ve been working on for years.”