Supporting Family Strengths - PROJECT ABSTRACT SUMMARY Project Title: Supporting Family Strengths Applicant: Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo County, Inc. (CAPSLO) Address: 1030 Southwood Dr., San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 Phone: 805.544.4355 Elizabeth "Biz" Steinberg, CEO esteinberg@capslo.org website: capslo.org Brief Description of Project Need and Population: Migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families enrolled in CAPSLO’s Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Program in Monterey County on California’s Central Coast face a plethora of challenges that affect their health, mental health, and well-being. Stressors include physically demanding work; exposure to heat, pesticides, and workplace injuries; low wages, poverty, and financial insecurity; limited access to health care; language and cultural barriers; job insecurity due to weather and crop conditions; and high rates of stress, anxiety, and depression related to working conditions and lack of resources. These issues can increase the risk factors associated with child maltreatment if adequate supports are not available. The project will reach farmworker families in five predominantly rural communities in Monterey: Chualar, Greenfield, King City, Soledad, and Salinas. Families participating in both center-based and family child care options will be reached. Goal and Purpose: With the goal of preventing child abuse and neglect in the migrant community by strengthening family stability and well-being, this project will use a parent education and case-management approach to increase the use of protective factors in the home to reduce family stress, teach healthy parenting and co-parenting skills, and connect caregivers to vital resources before daily challenges turn into crisis or maltreatment. Approach: To address these risk factors, parent education will be the primary strategy used to prevent child abuse or neglect, with family support services (a.k.a. case management) included as an integral component to engage families with unmet basic needs and provide three levels of intervention. Two empirically proven, evidence-based parent education approaches, Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) and Parent Cafés (PCs) will be delivered by qualified facilitators and parent educators in CAPSLO’s Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) department, highly experienced in providing these strategies. Three SFI workshop series and two PC sessions will be provided annually over five years. Across all strategies, a minimum of 120 parents per year and 600 over five years will be reached. SFI and PCs address co-parenting and parenting skills, which reduce household stress; improve trust, communication, and conflict resolution within the parenting relationship; and build positive discipline routines and realistic expectations of child development. When parents learn effective coping strategies and child development skills, they create predictable, nurturing homes that lower household conflict and foster emotional resilience in children, which further reduces the likelihood that child abuse or neglect will occur. Families receiving any of the three levels of family support services (prevention-, intervention-, and intensive-level) will have their basic needs met and have access to resource navigation, which will enable them to connect to community services that further support them. These interventions will improve family stability and self-sufficiency. Staffing and accessibility: Supporting Family Strengths will be staffed by an FCSS project manager, two parent educators who will deliver parent cafés and family support services, and two co-facilitator consultants who will deliver the SFI series. Most services will be delivered in MSHS centers because of their accessibility in each community.
