The Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities (SFSC) parenting programme empowers parents to make decisions about their parenting values. For facilitators delivering the programme, they have seen parents in every group that they deliver use the safe space that a group creates to explore their values from healthy eating to internet use, politics and faith.
Working with parents from the perspective of healthy relationships and reducing parental conflict, our SFSC: Stronger Relationships course has taken this exploration of parenting values a step further. We acknowledge that parents have different values and give them the information and techniques to work through these differences in a respectful, proactive way, with a child’s needs central to their decision making.
Challenge Fund 2 Project
We are very excited to be moving into the final stage of our Challenge Fund 2 project with the launch of our parenting plan workshops next month. We will now be inviting co-parents who want to commit to raising their child/ren with an agreed set of parenting values to work towards a ‘parenting plan’.
We have co-produced a parenting plan template and workshop format with partner organisations, Approachable Parenting, The Caribbean and African Health Network (‘CAHN’), Black SEN Mamas, Future Men, The Somali Youth Development Resource Centre (‘SYDRC’) and Options 180. Parents can record their child/ren’s wishes and needs, agree where a child will live, who they will spend time with, arrangements for education, faith, health and anything else they think is important. The two-part workshops will take place online for co-parents to work towards the completion of a parenting plan.
We want to recruit co-parent ‘couples’ (living apart or together) interested in the workshops who have completed or are prepared to complete the in-person or online Stronger Relationships or SFSC programmes.
Up until now, parenting plans have been introduced to parents after they have struggled to agree on the arrangements for their child/ren for some time and have ended up having to apply to the Family Court. With this innovative project, we want to avoid the stress, time and expense that this involves by reaching families earlier.
For more information or to refer, please contact Eleni Bloy: eleni.sfsc@racefound.org.uk or on 07708 360561
