Parents Forum: Real families talking together
PARENTS FORUM provides accessible and powerful communications skills workshops to parents, other caregivers and community members who are not parents. Our program is non-sectarian, non-political and non-professional. Workshops are based on an original eight-question curriculum: see www.parentsforum.org. The presentations have proven consistently successful in settings as diverse as grammar schools, prisons, libraries, workplace seminars and university parents weekend programs and over a wide socio-economic range. Most importantly for the barrier and the insight that are our focus, is the fact that 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.
Participants in our workshops increase their emotional awareness, as, guided by a facilitator, they ask themselves and each other how they feel and what they think about situations in their recent (or distant) family, household or workplace experience. The questions and associated exercises elicit a clear understanding of the feelings and thoughts underlying the behaviors that make up our everyday interactions with family members, friends and associates.
We address anger and resentment openly, as well as grief and regret, urging participants to express these strong feelings using a simple conversational formula that works, despite its apparent simplicity, on a deep level and across the many lines of difference that divide people including age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and family situation.
Workshop facilitators are not therapists. A key aspect of our approach, which is part scripted and part spontaneous, is that it is volunteer-led. In answering each of the eight questions and working through the exercises, participants are urged to express the negative but frame it positively. As if learning a new language, individuals express feelings without judging them, then consider the consequences of various actions. The process can be learned and can be taught, like a language, only through practice.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Focus of activity
Community Involvement
Year the initiative began
1991
Position your initiative on the mosaic of solutions
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Insensitive & Unresponsive Systems
Which of the insights is the primary focus of your work?
Create Paths to Prevention or Remediation
If you believe some other barrier or insight should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic
NOTE (this is not another barrier or insight): I chose the barrier 'insensitive and unresponsive systems' as the primary focus of our work because programs for parents are too often provided in a negative context and parents are blamed, rather than supported, when their children experience difficulties and cause problems. Of course parents who experience difficulties and cause problems themselves also need support as parents as well as support with and help resolving the individual or personal aspects of their difficulties or behaviors.
Name Your Project
Parents Forum: Real families talking together
Describe Your Idea
PARENTS FORUM provides accessible and powerful communications skills workshops to parents, other caregivers and community members who are not parents. Our program is non-sectarian, non-political and non-professional. Workshops are based on an original eight-question curriculum: see www.parentsforum.org. The presentations have proven consistently successful in settings as diverse as grammar schools, prisons, libraries, workplace seminars and university parents weekend programs and over a wide socio-economic range. Most importantly for the barrier and the insight that are our focus, is the fact that 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.
Participants in our workshops increase their emotional awareness, as, guided by a facilitator, they ask themselves and each other how they feel and what they think about situations in their recent (or distant) family, household or workplace experience. The questions and associated exercises elicit a clear understanding of the feelings and thoughts underlying the behaviors that make up our everyday interactions with family members, friends and associates.
We address anger and resentment openly, as well as grief and regret, urging participants to express these strong feelings using a simple conversational formula that works, despite its apparent simplicity, on a deep level and across the many lines of difference that divide people including age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and family situation.
Workshop facilitators are not therapists. A key aspect of our approach, which is part scripted and part spontaneous, is that it is volunteer-led. In answering each of the eight questions and working through the exercises, participants are urged to express the negative but frame it positively. As if learning a new language, individuals express feelings without judging them, then consider the consequences of various actions. The process can be learned and can be taught, like a language, only through practice.
Innovation
Description of Initiative
PARENTS FORUM provides accessible and powerful communications skills workshops to parents, other caregivers and community members who are not parents. Our program is non-sectarian, non-political and non-professional. Workshops are based on an original eight-question curriculum: see www.parentsforum.org. The presentations have proven consistently successful in settings as diverse as grammar schools, prisons, libraries, workplace seminars and university parents weekend programs and over a wide socio-economic range. Most importantly for the barrier and the insight that are our focus, is the fact that 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.
Participants in our workshops increase their emotional awareness, as, guided by a facilitator, they ask themselves and each other how they feel and what they think about situations in their recent (or distant) family, household or workplace experience. The questions and associated exercises elicit a clear understanding of the feelings and thoughts underlying the behaviors that make up our everyday interactions with family members, friends and associates.
We address anger and resentment openly, as well as grief and regret, urging participants to express these strong feelings using a simple conversational formula that works, despite its apparent simplicity, on a deep level and across the many lines of difference that divide people including age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and family situation.
Workshop facilitators are not therapists. A key aspect of our approach, which is part scripted and part spontaneous, is that it is volunteer-led. In answering each of the eight questions and working through the exercises, participants are urged to express the negative but frame it positively. As if learning a new language, individuals express feelings without judging them, then consider the consequences of various actions. The process can be learned and can be taught, like a language, only through practice.
Innovation
One important way our program differs from existing conflict management efforts is that we focus on individual experience rather than group identity such as race or gender, for example. Another key difference in our approach is its non-professional leadership. The fact that facilitators self-disclose in the course of leading workshop discussions serves to encourage open and honest participation from everyone in the group.
Our ‘magic’ lies also in the clear structure of the workshops themselves. Professionals in counseling, social work, medicine and education see our program as filling a social service gap for individuals with issues that merit attention but that may not be so serious as to need their guidance. We believe that ‘victims become victimizers’ and we must reach parents, across the board, as a key preventive measure to address domestic violence at its roots.
The cost of violence is staggering: a 2004 World Health Report (cited 11-16-06 in the Boston MA USA GLOBE op-ed page) estimated the cost of interpersonal violence in the U.S. at $300 billion per year. We believe that our program is one of few that offers parent peer support in a positive context while, in parallel, offering programs for prisoners to support their successful reintegration into family life upon their release.
A national initiative ‘creating parenting-rich communities’ of the Child Welfare League of America held in Syracuse New York (reported 11-17-06 in the Syracuse NY USA Post-Standard) gives us hope that demand for our services will grow among parents and funders.
After 15 years of a very low budget, ‘bare-bones’ existence, this year our organization got its first paying customer: a partner agency in Roxbury, Mass. Parents’ Management Inc. received funding to pay PARENTS FORUM a $1000 license fee for use of our materials and to pay stipends to a community coordinator and child care provider. The steady, if slow, growth of this project, still in its first months, leads us to believe that a license-fee-based model will allow us to build a sustainable organization.
Delivery Model
We have strong name recognition locally in the Boston, Massachusetts area and New England, and established contacts with like-minded organizations both nationally and internationally. Our program name, logo and print materials (workshop booklet) are trademarked. Our success has, however, been limited to date because we do not yet have adequate funding for staff to initiate strategic planning, program development and marketing efforts.
We have depended on two local donors who have given us small grants each of the last two years. With these funds we have hired a ten-hour-per-month grant-writer who is making grant submissions on our behalf. We believe that the program is ready to take to scale.
With a grant from Reed Elsevier Cares we will publish our handbook Where the Heart Listens online under a Creative Commons license, allowing free download of our materials for nonprofit use. We expect this effort to reach and engage new constituents: volunteers, members, agency partners and donors. The PARENTS FORUM board has been tireless in writing and speaking about the program, but funding for paid staff and marketing are both urgently needed.
Key Operational Partnerships
PARENTS FORUM belongs to the Cambridge, Mass., Chamber of Commerce, to CIVICUS (Johannesburg and Washington DC), and to the Vienna International Committee of NGOs on the Family. Our founder serves on the board of the International Federation for Parent Education (IFPE, Paris). We are part of the Health Communications Media Network of Johns Hopkins University. We have enthusiastic individual members in Uganda and Nigeria and our founder has given workshops for CIVICUS and IFPE in the Philippines, Botswana, Burkina Faso and Mexico.
Each year we mark International Day of Families, May 15th, coordinating our celebration with the theme proclaimed by the United Nations Programme on the Family.
In addition to the networks mentioned above, our founder belongs to the National Writers Union, the National Parenting Education Network and International Professionals. The latter is a listserv moderated by Bonnie Koenig author of Going Global for the Greater Good. Our founder has signed the recent (fall 2006) National Effective Parenting Initiative statement, is a past participant in World Learning, formerly the Experiment in International Living and is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In late 2005, our handbook received an endorsement from the Dalai Lama, for which we are very grateful.
Board development is a continuing challenge. Our local community has an oversupply of worthwhile agencies and an undersupply of people willing to dedicate time and money to a nonprofit venture.
Recognition by ASHOKA Changemakers would surely attract greater individual involvement in our program as well as strong institutional partners.
Impact
Financial Model
a) With partner agencies paying license fees, any parent can be – and is – included in PARENTS FORUM programs. In 2006 we hired a ten-hour-per-month grant-writer and our top priority is funding for an executive director’s position. We hope to see the grant-writer’s efforts pay off in 2007. Less than 10% of operating costs is covered by earned income (workshop fees and book sales).
b) We have strong anecdotal evidence of our effectiveness, but PARENTS FORUM is not yet self-sustaining. Membership dues and license fees are natural sources of revenue but our rudimentary management procedures and lack of staff keep either from contributing significantly to our resource base. We have depended on individual donors and definitely need to diversify and strengthen our financial planning in order to assure sustainability.
What percentage, if any, of the total operating costs does earned income (from products, services, or other fees) represent?
<10%
How is the initiative financed? Is it financially self-sustainable or profitable? How much do beneficiaries contribute?
Please see response to financial model question, above.
Effectiveness
In our 15-year history we have served from 1500 to 3000 people. After each workshop we measure our effectiveness on these criteria:
= Coming to this workshop was worth the time (and cost)
= I will use these skills and techniques with my family
= Facilitators were friendly and welcoming
= Facilitators were knowledgeable and helpful
= This was a safe, supportive environment
= I would recommend this workshop to other parents
= This program is needed for parents and families
Responses, 1 highly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 agree or 4 highly agree, are consistently in the 3 to 4 range.
Harvard and Northwestern University researchers are studying the relationship of parenting styles to children’s academic achievement are ongoing and we hope to see PARENTS FORUM become a study subject.
How many people have benefited from your program over the last year? Which element of the program proved itself most effective?
In a year we serve 100 to 200 people. These include parents and others who take part in our workshops in community settings (libraries, schools, colleges) and incarcerated fathers who sign up to take our programs in prison (there have been as many as five times as many sign up as these workshops can accommodate). Also, there are individuals who call us for referrals to crisis programs. We call on our network of local contacts in peer support activities and professional counselors in these cases. The workshops themselves (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.
Scaling up Strategy
We are working towards obtaining funding to hire an executive director. This person will be expected to initiate a strategic planning process, develop and manage programs, design reporting schemes to support membership and licensing programs as well as coordinate grant-seeking and other efforts to gain support from individuals and corporate donors. We urgently need a strategic plan (this could include creating an endowment fund) that would include goals for numbers of members and volunteers, numbers of chapters (licensed sites), member, volunteer and donor engagement and a steady and diversified revenue stream.
Stage of the Initiative
1
Origin of the Initiative
The program grew out of serious family crises when my sons were teenagers. From the lessons I learned, primarily the importance of fostering my own emotional awareness, with the help of other parents, I created PARENTS FORUM and wrote Where the Heart Listens, the program handbook. In the closing chapter of that book, I 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.”
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate?
I already knew about Ashoka through CIVICUS, received an email about the Peace Building competition and entered that in November 2006. Today I received an invitation to enter the Domestice Violence Prevention competition and am doing so, gratefully! My main incentive is to publicize our program. Recognition by ASHOKA will certainly inspire interest in our work and this could lead to funding to help us take PARENTS FORUM to scale.
Main Obstacles to Scaling Up
We need funding to hire a director. We need a director to run our program. It is as simple as this: the two main challenges PARENTS FORUM faces are money and people.
Main Financial Challenges
Most parent support is professional and / or remedial. That is, it is given to parents or children by professionals, educators, doctors, social workers, counselors and such, after a family situation has deteriorated to a point where professional intervention is necessary.
The two-fold challenge of financing our volunteer, preventive activities involves educating parents and professionals alike about the value of parent peer support and convincing funders that parent peer support is an essential complement to existing programs both professional and remedial. This is a chicken and egg dilemma in that we need to provide and document our activities in order to justify funding and, at the same time, we need funding in order to provide and document our activities.
We believe that seed money of approximately $100,000 USD from a social investor or private foundation would provide a solid basis for scale up. This sum would pay a director for a limited time (one year) during which time program initiatives could be put in place to assure adequate revenue for future sustainable growth.
Main Partnership Challenges
The challenge of engaging partners is closely related to the challenges in financing growth of our initiative, described above. People tend to want ‘the best’ for themselves and their children and this seems to mean expert advice. It is hard to put your finger on emotional awareness and just as hard to convince leaders of parent groups that emotional awareness can do wonders for parents themselves as well as for the children of parents in their groups. We see our primary partners as individual parents who will become members and parent groups who will become licensees of our program. Engaging both is a hard sell.
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