Maryville is committed to facilitating meaningful collaborative conversations with parents to help them achieve greater success in their parenting initiatives. We are able to facilitate transformative conversations by creating a safe space for parents to share and learn from each other. We have already seen partnerships forming amongst participants. Parents have the ability to feel connected to other parents which provides support to them. The peer-to-peer sharing and learning is exciting to watch.

Yesterday someone dissed my Vitality goal. He said, “How are you going to achieve a goal unless it’s specific?” Dismissively. Derisively. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Because the conventional wisdom is that a goal has to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Appetizing, Reasonable, Time-Limited) to be good.

On June 1, 2018, I visited my friends who are the Soweto Forum Parent Café (Kikao Cha Wazazi) Team in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya. I first went to Kibera in 2015 as part of an early childhood initiative sponsored by the Utopia Foundation called Harambee Toto (coming together for the little ones). That initiative was responsible for building the beautiful center where today’s meeting was hosted. My part was to train members of the Soweto Forum (a 14-year-old community organizing and housing rights activist group) in the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors and Parent Cafés.

My heart broke when I listened to the recording of a 911 call made to police by a woman on a campus tour at Colorado State University to report two young men who had joined the tour because “They just really stand out. When I asked what they were wanting to study I could tell they were making stuff up because one of them started to laugh about it” and their “behavior is just really odd.” She described the two young men as “Hispanic,” noting that one stated that he was “from Mexico.”  She added: :If it's nothing, I'm sorry, but they, it actually made me feel, like, sick.”

After having worked for a good long time as a staff on strengthening families by building Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors, Be Strong Families had a collective epiphany. We were at a staff retreat and talking about our favorite subject when someone said: “A strong parent is a healthy parent.”

It happened. Again. Hip-hop artist Kanye West has inserted his foot into his mouth. In a recent interview with TMZ, the artist is quoted as saying that “slavery was a choice.” The video went viral and ever since then, the floodgates of commentary and memes have not stopped flowing. Perhaps that was Kanye’s intention; to create buzz or start a conversation.  He wouldn’t be the first celebrity guilty of stirring up buzz to boost his own star potential. And while that “shine” may elevate one star’s ego, what’s the overarching impact of the “shade”?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Be Strong Families’ theory of change underlying Parent Cafés. What I mean by this is: why do we believe / know that getting people in touch with their deepest desires, their dreams for themselves and their families, and their best selves makes a long-term difference in the way they parent? Why do we believe / know that when parents get together in emotionally safe spaces to share with each other, without judgment, that lasting change in their relationships to themselves and their kids occurs? 

As key players in New York’s City’s first primary prevention initiative, the Be Strong Families East Team headed out to New York City in November to introduce the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors framework and Parent Cafés.