Why Parent Cafés? Spotlight on Help Me Grow and Goal Concordant Care
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. In 2022, Be Strong Families joined Tufts Medical Center, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, and the University of Buffalo to build the parent engagement capacity of 3 partners in the Help Me Grow national network: Marin County, Washington D.C., and 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 services. Nurturing a healthy and supportive community within family-serving programs is what Parent Cafés are all about. As parents authentically engage with other parents and staff as equals in small group conversations about family life, their experience being listened to, having their thoughts and feelings validated. They have what is often a rare opportunity for busy, overworked, and stressed-out parents to reflect, to step back and get clear on who they are as parents, what they want for their children, and to share those deep, important, meaningful aspirations and real barriers with other parents. Cafés provide the safe context and sacred time for individual deep self-reflection and peer to peer learning.
Starting a Café effort in a community-based program is a long-term commitment to parent engagement that breaks down barriers and shifts power dynamics in the relationships between staff and parents thereby moving programs towards realizing their dreams of beloved community. To support the success of engaging parents in Goal Concordant Care, Be Strong Families hosted the Help Me Grow affiliates in skill-building professional development workshops to enhance their parent engagement skills and learn more about the Strengthening Families Protective Factors that are hard-wired into Parent Cafés. These workshops are interactive, experiential and they go beyond concepts and frameworks to engage professionals where they struggle. Similar and parallel to what Parent Cafés do with parents, BSF parent engagement skill building workshops create safe space and supportive context for family-serving professionals to face and address their barriers to authentic, meaningful, sustainable parent engagement. These workshops increase staff readiness to wholeheartedly support a parent-led team in implementing Parent Cafés. After the parent engagement and Protective Factors workshops, each of the Help Me Grow sites then participated in Parent Café Training online and Be Strong Families traveled to each of the sites to provide a workshop designed to give the Parent Café hosts the needed skills to host Parent Cafés in person. The sites are hosting Cafés now and Be Strong Families is providing ongoing technical assistance to ensure the success of these fledgling Café efforts.
To learn more about this initiative, visit the Advancing Goal Concordant Care through Help Me Grow Implementation.
