Our Experience at the 2020 Together for Families Conference
The biennial Together for Families Conference was held from October 14-16 of 2020, and was a phenomenal success with more than 400 registrants attending—well over the initial expectation of 350. We saw three days of plenaries, presentations, and discussions around supporting families’ advancement, and Be Strong Families was thrilled to cohost this virtual event and organize the Advancing Equity track, which convened conversations through interactive workshops that promoted racial awareness, diversity, equity, and inclusion in partnerships to strengthen families and enhance communities. Below are the workshops that included the Advancing Equity track:
Workshop #2: Leading with Cultural Competence and the Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI)
Workshop #3: Family Success Centers: A Vehicle to Access Those Disproportionately Affected by Social Determinants of Health
Workshop #8: Applying CSSP’s Anti-Racist Intersectional Frame to Family Support
Workshop #14: What One Caring Adult Can Do
Workshop #15: It's Not All about Money! Co-Creating Sustainable Family Strengthening Centers by Mobilizing Mutual Assistance
Workshop #16: Supporting Transracial Adoption
Be Strong Families also hosted an A More Perfect Union (AMPU) Parent Café for registrants. AMPU Cafés act as a tool for equity through fostering transformative conversations and honoring the broader context for parenting in a complex and unjust world, assisting parents and caregivers with positively and proactively navigating this landscape in the process. Conference registrants were able to fully immerse themselves in the Café experience by joining in the AMPU Café activities and conversations, and pulling from their personal experiences and values to feel heard and supported. Here are just some of the questions that AMPU Café participants can discuss at length:
What do you wish people you don’t usually talk to would understand about your culture, race, or religion?
What is the role of a supportive community in your becoming who you are?
How is America enriched by African American culture?
How has the government promoted or undermined your family’s prosperity?
What role does social media play in promoting or diminishing safety?
Be Strong Families also participated in two of the Conference plenaries. In the first plenary, Alexandra James gave a synthesized presentation from one of our popular workshops: Viewing Parent Engagement through A Lens of Equity. She promoted a positive paradigm shift in parent engagement (check out our workshops on Parent Engagement here) and parent leadership development that is built upon mutual respect, support, and understanding.
One of our favorite quotes that captures how we can approach parent engagement and parent leadership development
How do we shift this paradigm of parent engagement? By looking through the lens of equity, we can highlight three key factors that need to be embedded into family service programs: economic equity, political equity, and social equity.
Economic equity means that we need to treat parents the way we would treat staff. Value their time, their expertise, and budget appropriately as an organization for their involvement and engagement. Political equity means sharing power and doing more than just talking about parent leadership. This means not only creating room at every decision-making table, but also structuring the conversations at those tables so that all voices are heard, respected, and valued. Finally, social equity means staying informed about inequitable societal norms and understanding how that changes our attitudes, our behaviors, and how we show up and partner with families.
Alexandra stressed that these factors of equity are an ongoing process, and we must challenge ourselves to consistently try to be better in parent engagement. For Be Strong Families, Parent Cafés have been a tool to do just that and create an ongoing, long-term strategy around parent engagement and parent leadership.
Our CEO, Katthe Wolf, was part of the Conference’s closing plenary, and you can check out the recording of this plenary below:
In this closing plenary, Katthe and other plenary guests answered two questions:
What lessons have you learned in 2020?
What do you see as the future of family support?
Katthe’s answer for the first question was to resist entropy. From the beginning of the pandemic, she saw a danger in people emotionally isolating and alienating themselves from support. It is an essential service to sustain and continue to build community in the face of the pandemic, and for us, we wanted to build community by offering free daily webinars by the community for the community so that people could gather in the middle of the day to provide structure when there wasn’t any in the outside world. To talk about what was going on. To share what was on their hearts and minds. We also began providing free training to those who had been trained on in-person Parent Cafés to take their Cafés online, and for Katthe, what has been amplified in the pandemic is that we need to be kind. We need to be ready to drop everything and be there to listen, to respond, and to provide love and support to those around us.
For the second question, Katthe broke her answer into two points. The first was the importance of eliminating white supremacy in the form of white organizational culture from all those organizations and programs providing family support services—specifically, the received and persistent structures that provide privilege to white people and white cultural ways, and designate those ways as dominant or mainstream. She highlighted the composition of the closing plenary panel as an example of this dominance of white organizational culture. The organizational representative leadership is overwhelmingly white, and the parent/community perspective is represented by a person of color—that’s not an accident. Katthe pointed out that this composition hasn’t substantially changed at these family support gatherings and conferences in the 30 years she’s been in the field. Including parents’ voices is essential, but this conversation started in the early 1990s. We have to go beyond this. We must be actively anti-racist in our day-to-day and long-term actions and goals in order to eliminate these systemic issues.
In her second point, Katthe emphasized the need to move in the direction of mobilizing mutual assistance, as this was part of the original principles of family support practice, dating back to the turn of the 20th century. The future of family support is a paradigm shift that has professionals putting their energies behind community efforts to keep each other strong, and where the community is diverse and inclusive. In short, we can do so much more in the future—if the family support field pivots to being by the people for the people.
We want to thank everyone who spoke and presented at the Together for Families Conference, and for all who registered and came with open minds and open hearts. We greatly enjoyed cohosting this Conference, and we are thrilled to be involved in the conversation of what the future holds for family support and family engagement.
Article by: Andrew Hitchcock