How and why do organizations that serve families use Parent Cafés as a strategy for parent engagement? Often, it’s to create a solid foundation of partnership between staff and parents and among the parents in a program to advance other programmatic initiatives. Be Strong Families partnered with Tufts Medical Center’s Center for the Study of Social Policy and the University of Buffalo, in order to strengthen the parent engagement capacities of three partners of the Help Me Grow National Network: Marin County Washington D.C. Northwest Florida.
These affiliates are committed to a strengths-based approach to building on parents’ goals for their child’s well-being called “goal-concordant care”. Goal concordant care seeks to have parents’ goals as drivers in the process of developmental promotion, early identification of concern, and referral and linkage to services the families assist in identifying. The lynchpin of successful goal concordant care is trusting relationships between program staff and parents, without these trusting relationships, parents will not open up about their concerns and won’t engage fully in conversations about needed…
