Parents Forum
This innovation also has a Project Page where you can read more about its latest progress.
Go to Project: Parents Forum.
In Parents Forum our mission is to foster honest, respectful and caring communications in families. We do this by helping parents and their allies develop emotional awareness both in workshops -- organized by community groups in schools and other settings -- and individually.
About You
Section 1: About You
First Name
Eve
Last Name
Sullivan
Website URL
Country
United States
Section 2: About Your Organization
Organization Name
Parents Forum
Organization Website
Organization Phone
617 - 253-7182
Organization Address
99 Bishop Allen Drive Cambridge MA 02139-3428
Organization Country
United States
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
Your idea
Name Your Project
Parents Forum
Country your work focuses on
United States
Describe Your Idea
In Parents Forum our mission is to foster honest, respectful and caring communications in families. We do this by helping parents and their allies develop emotional awareness both in workshops -- organized by community groups in schools and other settings -- and individually.
Innovation
What makes your idea unique?
We care for the young in order to maintain our families' and societies' vitality and assure a healthy, productive future. Focus on children's health and welfare, however, has led --in both the developed and the developing world-- to systemic neglect of parents' wellbeing outside the context of treatment for ills affecting children, young people and vulnerable adults.
Parents Forum counters this stance by calling for an investment of resources in all adults in care-giving roles, especially parents. Simply stated: kids do better when parents get help.
The program's unique peer support approach focusing on emotional awareness has been appreciated and encouraged by many people and groups since the program's founding in 1992. With its handbook, Where the Heart Listens, available online (and thanks in part to the founder's extensive travel), Parents Forum has prospective partners around the world.
The simplicity and effectiveness of Parents Forum make it a prime candidate to be taken to scale --as primary prevention and as an adjunct to treatment-- in a variety of settings including schools, clinics, workplaces and correctional facilities. The Parents Forum program name, logo and materials are trademarked. The program's tagline: Come Share Your Strength captures the program's positive intent.
A recent Young Foundation (UK) article "Focus on Outcomes for Parents" describes the deep and wide-ranging positive results of the kind of investment Parents Forum advocates. Our focus on emotional awareness makes our program uniquely suited to being adopted as part of broader parent support activities.
Do you have a patent for this idea?
Yes
Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
What impact have you had?
In workshops and one-on-one, Parents Forum creates a congenial, confidential, structured environment where parents share their experiences. The curriculum, based on eight questions, is outlined in the program handbook "Where the Heart Listens." It was published in print in 2001 and online, initially with a grant from Reed Elsevier Cares, in 2006. With a grant from Tech Foundation in Cambridge, Mass. (USA) Parents Forum re-launched the program website in June 2009 with fully interactive capabilities.
The program handbook "Where the Heart Listens" and workshop experiences have had and will continue to have a powerful impact on readers and participants, as these comments from community members, including incarcerated fathers, attest:
= The workshop gave me information I can use immediately, at home and everywhere!
= This is what’s missing in a lot of other parents’ programs.
= It offered new insights on things I ‘thought’ I knew.
= This program can be a solution. This program gives hope!
Each year the program serves from 100 to 200 people: parents and others who take part in the workshops in libraries, schools or colleges and incarcerated fathers who take our workshops in prison. Also, when individuals contact us for referrals to crisis programs, we call on our network of local contacts in peer support activities and professional counselors. Parents Forum workshops themselves in various formats: walk-up 15-minute mini-workshops as well as 1 to 2-hour presentations and all-day 'retreats,' are the core of the program and the most effective way to reach individuals.
Problem
Parenting is never easy but today's economic and social conditions, including the lure of online activities that diminish attention to family life, cause parents exceptional stress. Family conflicts, isolation and inter-generational alienation, along with addictions and mental health issues, are at the core of current social distress and community dysfunction.
A U.S. National Research Council and Institute of Medicine panel, February 2009, reported that ‘mental illness, substance abuse and behavioral problems among children and young adults cost the United States $247 billion a year in treatment and lost productivity alone.’ Pediatrics, July 2009, reported that educational programs for new parents on the risks of shaking a baby fail to include fathers who are 70% of the perpetrators.
Harlem Children's Zone in New York City and the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) in Latin America each show the success that can be achieved with parenting and family support programs.
Actions
Parenting is always a difficult endeavor but today's parents are under particular stress. Economic conditions and social conditions, including the lure of online activities that diminish attention to family life, are both important factors. Family conflicts, isolation and inter-generational alienation, along with addictions and mental health issues, are at the core of current social distress and community dysfunction. A U.S. National Research Council and Institute of Medicine panel reported in February 2009, on Valentine’s Day ironically, that ‘mental illness, substance abuse and behavioral problems among children and young adults cost the United States $247 billion a year in treatment and lost productivity alone.’
The success of initiatives such as Harlem Children's Zone in New York City and the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) in Latin America testify to the widespread need for parenting and family resource programs.
Results
Feedback from participants in our workshops is consistently favorable: presentations are very well received in settings as diverse as schools, libraries, workplaces and university parents' weekend seminars and over a wide socio-economic range. Most important, our program has been very successful with men, including men in prison. The main aspect of conflict management that we address is negative personal and interpersonal emotional experience. Our program offers simple but powerful conversational techniques to reduce individual tension and decrease conflict between people. Benefits of our approach include greater awareness of early warning signs for serious conditions - depression, suicidality, substance abuse, among others - and acceptance of the value of professional mental health treatment.
While have not yet engaged researchers to study our work, anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of our work, is all favorable. A key element of future programming should be scientific study of our approach and how it works.
What will it take for your project to be successful over the next three years? Please address each year separately, if possible.
We need to engage community partners: agencies to license our curriculum. These will be agencies that serve parents directly as well as those serving children. An example of the latter is the Boys and Girls Clubs of America; the program founder spoke with their national program director but for lack of time was not able to pursue the opportunity. We are presently seeking prospective local (Boston, Mass.) licensees in public health agencies and schools.
Considering the four questions given in Nudge (by Thaler and Sunstein) on behavioral economics: Who uses? Who chooses? Who pays? Who profits -and- benefits? Parents Forum would answer: ONE: Parents use our service by attending our workshops. TWO: Community and agency leaders who convene parent groups decide individually or collaboratively to adopt Parents Forum. THREE: These agencies pay license fees for our curriculum and training. FOUR: With enough licensees paying a fee of $1000 per year to Parents Forum, our agency becomes financially sustainable, parents become more confident and competent and, finally, children and young people do better in school and life. All benefit.
Please address each year separately, if possible.
2009-2010 Parents Forum is at a critical threshold, capable of making substantial progress towards realizing its potential but is limited in personnel and funding. The organization needs several additional board members to join the four dedicated current board. Funding for staff, office and marketing are all urgently needed.
2010-2011 and 2011-2012 A strategic plan needs to be developed that will set goals for the next years and beyond. The exercise of writing this Changemakers entry has allowed board and advisors to take a look back and a look ahead. We appreciate the opportunity of being considered in this competition and hope that the visibility it provides will bring the resources we need to be successful.
What would prevent your project from being a success?
Parents Forum needs staff and administrative resources to support the founder and board members in creating sustainable revenue streams. To allow the vision of Parents Forum to be realized long-term, an endowment should be a cornerstone of the program's organizational development, along with partnerships with like-minded organizations, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, mentioned in the response to the question above.
Our effort is part of a larger picture, however, that includes all parenting programs. While the value of parenting services is generally accepted, two serious barriers exist to their becoming widely accepted and widely available. First is the misperception that participating in parenting programs is a sign of parents' or children's past failures and, with that, a valid but off-putting link between parenting education and prevention of imminent danger or future risk. Second is the financial devaluation of the programs themselves.
To break down those barriers, the founder has suggested these initiatives:
= Implement a consistent and wide-ranging social marketing campaign over five to ten years to create a positive perception of parenting services as essential for everyone raising children.
= Develop behavioral economics strategies through health care, insurance and tax policy to encourage parents to access resources and to pay the many excellent parents program providers for their expertise and time.
If Parents Forum obtains the resources it needs, within a context of broad support for all parenting programs, we will be able to make a significant and long-lasting contribution toward improving community wellbeing.
How many people will your project serve annually?
101‐1000
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
Less than $50
Does your project seek to have an impact on public policy?
Yes
Sustainability
What stage is your project in?
Operating for more than 5 years
In what country?
United States
Is your initiative connected to an established organization?
Yes
If yes, provide organization name.
Parents Forum (The initiative presented is the program.)
How long has this organization been operating?
More than 5 years
Does your organization have a Board of Directors or an Advisory Board?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with NGOs?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with businesses?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with government?
No
Please tell us more about how these partnerships are critical to the success of your innovation.
Our mailing address has been provided by Cambridge Community Services where we had an office for five years. We closed our one-room office to save money and CCS will allow us to receive mail at their building through January 2010. The web development company Annkissam, whom we selected to work with us to launch our new site with Web 2.0 functionality, is hosting our site for free through May 2010. We benefit from pro bono legal services from an intellectual property law firm in Boston.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization?
Finding a strong leader or leaders, both volunteer and paid, to take the program forward
Inspiring a donor or donors to provide substantial funding
Creating effective marketing and developing program materials in all media (and in languages other than English)
The Story
What was the defining moment that led you to this innovation?
The program grew out of serious family crises when the founder's sons were teenagers. From the lessons she learned, primarily the importance of fostering her own emotional awareness, and with the help of Christine Bates and other parents, she created Parents Forum and wrote Where the Heart Listens, the program handbook. In the closing chapter of that book, she wrote:
“As our communities have become bigger, as our lives are too often invaded by news of violence if not directly by threat of violence or violence itself, and as commercialism encroaches further into our communities and our lives, we can maintain a positive vision. We can try to create loving and orderly homes. We can strive to be neighborly and tolerant. We can maintain an eagerness for new ideas. We can ‘live simply,’ as the expression goes, ‘so that others may simply live.’ I believe that we can and must do all of these things. I hope that Parents Forum will be a strong partner in the many personal, community and global efforts to do so.”
Tell us about the social innovator behind this idea.
Eve Sullivan, Parents Forum founder, trained as a language teacher and has spent the last 25 years as an editorial assistant for a theoretical physics journal at MIT. She excels at leveraging resources to provide excellent results for Parents Forum. She has been tireless in networking and collaborating to bring family and life successes to individuals on a personal level and to achieve broad community, regional and worldwide recognition for the program. She has three grown sons and has hosted and mentored many international students in her home over the past 20-plus years.
She serves on the boards of the National Parenting Education Network (USA) and the International Federation for Parent Education (IFPE/FIEP). Parents Forum belongs to CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation and, through IFPE/FIEP, she is involved in the Vienna International Committee of NGOs on the Family.
Eve is also involved with the Invest in Kids task group of the Partnership of America's Economic Success (www.partnershipforsuccess.org), and the NGO Committee on Mental Health at the U.N. in New York.
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
Through another organization or company
If through another, please provide the name of the organization or company
CIVICUS or email received from another organization
 | 179 weeks ago Naveen Shakir said: “Thanks for a great entry! Your initiative’s specific focus on parents of children with mental health issues as the organization’s main ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 186 weeks ago Elizabeth Araujo said: Hello, I am just relaying a comment for Parents Forum that came through the Changemakers pipeline and am posting on their behalf. "I ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 190 weeks ago Sarah Mintz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 190 weeks ago Sarah Mintz updated this Competition Entry. |
| 190 weeks ago Tyler Ahn updated this Competition Entry. |
| 191 weeks ago Thomas Matlack said: I certainly applaud the work of Parents Forum, for kids, moms and specially dads. I am particularly sensitive to this issue as a ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 191 weeks ago Eve Sullivan updated this Competition Entry. |
| 191 weeks ago Eve Sullivan updated this Competition Entry. |
| 191 weeks ago Eve Sullivan updated this Competition Entry. |
| 191 weeks ago Eve Sullivan updated this Competition Entry. |
