Program Goals:
To help families become engaged and thriving community members; and to help families nurture healthy children who can achieve their potential.
Twelve years ago the Saint Paul Children’s Initiative created eight family centers embedded in neighborhoods throughout the city of Saint Paul. These centers were created with the Family Support America principles of family support practice1 as the foundation. The East Side Family Center is one of five remaining centers.
Family Support is 2:
• A set of beliefs and an approach to strengthening and empowering families and communities so that they can foster the development of children, youth, and adult family members
• A type of grassroots, community-based program or center designed to prevent family problems by strengthening parent-child relationships and providing whatever parents need in order to be good nurturers and providers. These programs are numerous and exist across the country and are funded through a variety of resources, mostly federal in origin
• A shift in human services delivery and practice that encourage public and private agencies to work together and to become more preventive, responsive, flexible, family-focused, strengths based, and holistic-and thus more able to achieve results
• A movement for social change that urges all of us-policymakers, program providers, parents, employers, and others-to take full and complete individual and collective responsibility for improving the lives of children and families
• A national and statewide effort to ensure that all children and families get what they need to be self-sufficient and to succeed
 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
||||