Bernadette Rhoden, Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities (SFSC) lead trainer, worked with a group of practitioners last week who had flown to the UK from Bangladesh, with support from Eduprompt ( a UK based agency) in order to become SFSC facilitators.
This was the culmination of work over the last 12 months between the Foundation and Eduprompt. We aimed to support Bangladesh-based practitioners to develop a better understanding of the family as a protective factor and the role of parents in improving outcomes for children and young people through our evidence-based SFSC violence prevention programme. In the build-up to this project, a number of challenges had been identified by practitioners in Bangladesh for families and parents specifically (including the prevalence of violence impacting families). Masud Rana, who is a UK-based facilitator and Director of Eduprompt felt that SFSC would be a good fit for families in Bangladesh. SFSC has been delivered in the UK to parents from Bangladesh for many years and is a well established intervention in authorities such as Tower Hamlets for this community.
The first stage of this joint work involved a series of online sessions delivered to practitioners and parents in Bangladesh during 2021, designed to test SFSC materials for relevance and suitability for delivery of the model in Bangladesh. During this year, we also worked with Bangla-speaking UK-based practitioners Sina Akter and Mahera Ruby, who have extensive delivery experience in the UK, to ensure the translated materials were updated.
Several of the practitioners that we worked with online last year signed up to attend the full core SFSC training and travelled here from Bangladesh to do so. This took place over six days at the Foundation training suite last week. Learning from this training will be shared through a further blog from Bernadette in due course. In addition, this week the group will be visiting the Muslim Community Association to observe delivery of an SFSC programme to the Bangla speaking community in East London and to meet parents who have taken part in the programme.
We are planning to work with Eduprompt to support delivery of SFSC in Bangladesh with these newly trained practitioners and to train another cohort of individuals to encourage further rollout of the model.
Leandra Box is Programme Manager at the Race Equality Foundation.
