Race Equality Foundation - Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities
Development of the programme
The Race Equality Foundation has, for a number of years, been at the leading edge of work on improving the support that black and minority ethnic families receive. Part of this has involved carrying out research and saw us carry out a study of the use of family centres by black and minority ethnic families. Our findings, included evidence that while parent education programmes were being implemented by almost all the family centres, there was little evidence of black and minority parents participating in these programmes. This appeared to confirm, other small-scale studies, which painted a similar picture.
Yet we had seen research from America that not only were African American and other 'minority' parents participating in parent 'training' programmes, but that they and their children appeared to be benefiting from these programmes. We suggested perhaps it was the content of the programmes being deployed in the UK, as well as how successfully black and minority ethnic parents were attracted and engaged by these programmes that was leading to a lack of take-up of these programmes.
The development of the Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities parent programme is a collaboration with Dr Marilyn Steele (see: www.parentingacrosscultures.com) who alongside Jerry Tello, Ronald Johnson and Marilyn Marigna successfully developed and ran parent programmes with minority ethnic communities across America. We revised the Strengthening Multiethnic families and Communities programme to make it more relevant to the UK context and this has become the Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities parent programme.
Since this process took place in 1999-2000, SFSC has gone from strength to strength. In the past six year, Marilyn with the Race Equality Foundation has trained around 1500 facilitators. Hundreds of programmes have been delivered to thousands of parents.
Further information
For further information on the development of the Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities parent programme please see: