WWLP Highlight Coalition’s Family Day Efforts
WWLP Channel 22, the largest news station in Western Mass, covered the Coalition’s efforts at promoting quality family time on the evening news on Family Day! Check out the coverage HERE.
PEER Ambassadors create videos to celebrate Family Day!
In celebration of Family Day, the Coalition’s PEER Ambassadors worked with GCTV to create a video Public Service Announcements – check out the version in English and the one in Spanish! The videos highlight the many benefits of family dinners and quality family time and encourages people to set up routines that include regular time for family connection. National Family Day – which celebrates simple, everyday things parents do to connect with their kids – is the Fourth Monday in September each year. This year Family Day is September 26th. Check out the videos and then celebrate with your Family!!
2022 Parent Guide Released!
The Parent and Family Engagement Workgroup’s 2022 Parent Guide was released on Wednesday, September 21. This 16-page insert is distributed through the Greenfield Recorder and the Athol Daily News, and includes valuable information for local parents on topics including substance use prevention, mental health promotion, health and nutrition, online safety, and more, with an emphasis on local resources. This year’s guide has a great cover article on support systems for transgender young people and their families. It also includes lots of photos and contributions from the Coalition’s PEER Community Ambassadors (PEER=Parent Engagement, Enrichment, and Resources). Take a look and share it widely!
Regional Snapshot of How Franklin County and North Quabbin Schools are Advancing Racial Justice
On June 9, 2022, the Communities That Care Coalition released a report, How Franklin County and North Quabbin Schools are Advancing Racial Justice. Leigh-Ellen Figueroa presented a slideshow summary at the Coalition’s Biannual Meeting at Greenfield High School. The report is based on interviews with 41 key school personnel from all nine local public school districts, including administrators, teachers, counselors, nurses, and students. The report identifies strengths, challenges, needs, recommendations, action steps, and resources.
Please contact Leigh-Ellen (LFigueroa “at” frcog.org) for more information.
You can view and download the report below.
Racial Justice Workgroup Planning IEP Forum
The Racial Justice Workgroup is working on Planning a community forum for ….
Check out these online resources to find services in Western and Central Massachusetts
Look4Help is an online search tool for all kinds of services in Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions. Look4Help has a range of resources sorted into easy-to-navigate resources including topics like: mental health, addition and recovery, health care, disability services, finances, transportation, domestic violence, and more. It is a project of Community Action Pioneer Valley, together with Baystate Health and the United Way.
My Turn: “Steering our children clear of addiction”
Kat Allen’s My Turn column ran in the Greenfield Recorder July 22, 2016. It highlights some of what parents of younger kids can do to prevent substance use.
Of course, I don’t mean to make it sound like this stuff [like locking up alcohol and hiding ’empties’] is all there is to substance use prevention. There’s the all-important emotional skills (how do you handle big feelings like anger and anxiety in healthy ways?) and social skills (how do you make a new friend, or say “no” politely to a request from a friend?) that we’re teaching them — intentionally or not — through modeling and teachable moments.
And I’m delighted to report that nearly all of our local middle schools are teaching this, too, by offering the LifeSkills program.
And there’s the super-protective-factor of the warm, caring, safe relationship that kids have with their parents. These are far beyond the scope of my locking cabinet in the pantry but obviously tremendously important to drug and alcohol prevention and just about everything else in life.
Kat Allen
In case you missed it, you can find the article here.
Family Day
Family Day is a national celebration of family dinners and a reminder of the importance of spending quality time together as a family. s youth grow and reach their developmental competencies, there are contextual variables that promote or hinder the process. Family dinners are proven to promote these competencies.
The benefits of families enjoying meals together include opportunities to:
- Connect as a family to talk about almost anything
- Cook with your children
- Give your children regular chores, like setting the table or helping to clean up after the meal
While these may sound simple or mundane, they’re vital protective factors that correlate with positive teen health outcomes related to decreased substance use.
A protective factor is often defined as “a characteristic at the biological, psychological, family, or community (including peers and culture) level that is associated with a lower likelihood of problem outcomes or that reduces the negative impact of a risk factor on problem outcomes.”
O’Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009 p. xxvii
You’ll find lots of ideas about family-friendly meals, conversation starters, dinnertime games, and more (like getting everyone to help prepare dinner and clean up afterwards!) at the Family Dinner Project and Family Day websites. Here’s a post (with recipes!) about Family Dinner Day from our Parent Education Workshop, and listen in here for an interview with Bekki Craig of CTC’s Parent Education Workgroup on WHAI about Family Day.
PEER Ambassadors
We are launching a new program for reaching out to local parents! The PEER Ambassador Program (PEER stands for Parent Engagement, Enrichment, and Resources) is a collaboration between a number of different community organizations that work with parents and families. Currently the host sites include The Recover Project, The Salasin Center, the North Quabbin Community Coalition, and Community Action’s Family Center (who also works with the Center for New Americans).
These organizations have nominated parents who are natural leaders from within their programs to participate in the PEER Ambassador self-paced training program, and then to represent their organizations and the Communities That Care Coalition in providing outreach and education to other parents in the region – helping to connect families to important online and local resources. PEER Ambassadors receive monthly stipends for their participation as well as ongoing professional development opportunities.
Shared Use and Community Kitchens Webinar
On September 24, 2018, the Communities That Care Coalition hosted a workshop for advocates of community use of space for food production and organizations interested in producing food products for sale or donation. For those unable to attend, the content of the workshop was captured in a webinar available here.