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 Centre for Addictionand Mental Health |
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A program, compassion and creativity strengthen at-risk familiesPutting a unique twist on family care, there’s a successful CAMH program producing “phenomenal” results across Ontario, and its organizers want to spread the news. Strengthening Families for the Future is a family change program designed to reduce factors that put families at risk, and enhance factors that can help families to function well. “It’s a really awesome program, and it deserves to have its story shared with more people,” says Donna Boston, CAMH’s Coordinator with FOCUS in Sault Ste. Marie and a member of CAMH’s Regional Services group, which has consultants working in education, health promotion and building mental health and addiction service capacity across Ontario. “One of the unique features of the program is that it involves the whole family and not just the children, and the fact that it has a specific target group,” says Program Consultant Michelle Ott, CAMH Provincial Services, Northern Ontario. “It was done with the children whose parents have a history of substance abuse, although you don’t have to identify with that. It’s really an effective primary prevention program for any family.”
The Family that Eats Together…
Since the official launch in the fall of 2006, 24 communities across Ontario have implemented the program. In Sault Ste. Marie, the community opened the program to families with children who are at risk of being suspended from school, or who are currently under suspension. The community came together to support the program, with school principals helping to identify at-risk families, a local high school providing free facilities, and the food class prepared meals. “For some families, just sitting down together to a nutritious meal is very rare,” Michelle says. “That’s very important.” One of the family members involved adds, “I never thought a family meal could be so much fun.” On the first day of the program, families take part in three hour-long components: in the first hour, families come together for a nutritious meal; in the second hour, the children and parents have separate sessions, where among other things they learn methods for interacting in socially acceptable ways with each other and in the community at large. “The third hour, everyone comes together, and talks about what they learned. Then they go home and do some work on it and come back the next week,” Michelle says. The entire program is 14 weeks long, but in Sault Ste. Marie’s case, they offered two nine-week sessions: the first ran in the fall of 2008, and the second in January, 2009. Families had the choice of attending one or both of the nine-week sessions. Not only did all 10 families from the first session return to take the second, two new families joined along the way. The program always tries to make child care (for younger children) and transportation available, especially in small communities where taxis are hard to come by, or where there isn’t extensive public transportation, and that is another key to its success, says Pam Gardiner, Program Facilitator in Kitchener-Waterloo. “The program is set up to recognize and address barriers that might potentially prevent families from being able to participate, such as transportation costs and challenges, child care, and dinner. This contributed to a very high retention rate for us,” she says.
A Family Reunites “We try to increase the protective factors within the family unit,” Michelle says, and she describes one heartwarming success story from the program that was implemented in a remote First Nations community near Kenora. “One of the moms didn’t have custody of her children. She was drinking heavily, and she was separated from her partner, and her children were under the care of her mother-in-law,” Michelle says. “She wanted help. She didn’t have a lot of parenting skills. She didn’t know how to relate to her kids very well, and there was also some resistance from her partner to having the kids involved,” she says. “After 14 weeks, the changes were quite phenomenal. Her program ended last year, and now she’s abstaining from drinking, and she has her kids back.” Michelle explains how it was more than the learning that took place during the sessions that helped this family. “She was really grateful for the opportunity to be in a safe environment, and just to be with other parents or caregivers who may be going through something similar, to have that support network that a lot of parents or caregivers don’t have.”
School and Community Support Along with helping identify families and providing room and meals, the high schools also finds potential “youth mentors” who are at risk of being suspended to join the program. The mentors are invited to attend as positive role models, and in return they get their suspension either minimized or sometimes totally removed. They are expected to come to the program with a positive attitude and be prepared to help. Other supports from the community in Sault Ste. Marie included local businesses and groups adopting one or more families for the Christmas holiday. The total price for adopting a family was $225, which ensured that each family received a nutritious food basket once a month for one full year from our local Soup Kitchen. Any remaining money allowed the program to put together Christmas gift baskets for each family. The basket also included towels, soap and deodorant donated from the taxi company that makes weekly deliveries to the families. As well, the local Women In Crisis centre donated hats and mitts, and the CAMH/FOCUS Sault Ste Marie office, along with office partners at the Sault Ste. Marie LHIN office, opened their wallets to sponsor one family collectively.
Origins South of the Border The program originated in the 1980s with Dr. Karol Kumpher in the U.S. From 2000 to 2005, several departments at CAMH worked together with community agencies to revise the materials, putting it into a Canadian context, and conducting a large study. The spirit of working across boundaries continues in the implementation of Strengthening Families. In most communities, just as in Sault Ste. Marie, it’s delivered by a coalition of partners from diverse sectors like children's mental health, schools, addiction programs, aboriginal services, public health, adult mental health and child protection. Working together to offer Strengthening Families not only yields positive outcomes for families, program facilitators say the experience leads to valuable relationships with service providers from other sectors. Better service linkages and implementing evidence based programs like Strengthening Families are key features in CAMH's strategic goal of building a better-integrated healthcare system with greater capacity for mental health and addiction services. For more information about Strengthening Families click here, or contact the CAMH Provincial Services regional staff nearest you.
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Last updated: Apr 21, 2009 11:42 AM Published: Nov 20, 2009 6:05 PM ID#P43192 |