The Family Resource Center Model
What is a Family Resource Center?
Michael Williams, director of the California Family Resource Association noted, “when you visit one Family Resource Center you have visited one Family Resource Center.” In other words, every FRC should reflect the people in the community and be customized to meet their needs. The Center can be a neighborhood, community, or school-based hub of support for families that reflects and is responsive to the community in which it is located. A Family Resource Center provides support for families at no cost.
California Welfare & Institutions Code Section 18951(g) defines a Family Resource Center as “an entity providing family-strengthening services that are embedded in communities, culturally sensitive, and include cross-system collaboration to assist in transforming families and communities through reciprocity and asset development based on impact-driven and evidence-informed approaches with the goal of prevention of child abuse and neglect and strengthening children and families.”
Family Resource Centers goals often include the following:
- Enhance parenting skills
- Foster the healthy development and well-being of children, youth, and families
- Prevent child abuse and neglect
- Increase school readiness
- Connect families to resources
- Develop parent and community leadership
- Engage males and fathers
- Support healthy marital and couples relationships
- Promote family economic success
The types of services offered in Family Resource Centers can vary based upon individual communities' needs. Often, they provide services that offer parenting support, access to basic needs assistance, and parent leadership development.
John Reed Elementary School Family Resource Center
The Family Resource Center (FRC) on the campus of John Reed Elementary School located within the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District in the high opportunity neighborhoods of Rohnert Park’s Section A and B aims to help parents gain the skills and resources necessary to raise healthy and successful children through building parental resilience, healing from trauma, increasing family social connections, providing concrete support in times of need, teaching effective parenting and child development practices, strengthening the social and emotional competence of children.
The FRC goals are to help ensure that families attending John Reed Elementary school are able to access resources through navigation to needed services, help provide concrete supports to strengthen family financial stability, provide parenting education by providing parenting classes and in home visitation, offer case management, and provide parent leadership and engagement in order to reduce adverse experiences for children.
The full scope of FRC services are grounded in Evidence-Based, Best-Practice and Evidence-Informed Models that specifically address the needs of the community’s most vulnerable children. Providing strength-based services, families can successfully overcome many barriers associated with toxic stress, poverty, structural determinants of health and inequities across health, education and income.
FRC Strengthening Families Framework – 5 Protective Factors
Recent research on the efficacy of the “five protective factors” included in the “Strengthening Families” framework has provided core direction in the FRC program development and implementation. Research demonstrates that these factors “reduce the incidence of child abuse and neglect by providing parents with what they need to parent effectively, even under stress.”
The Center for Social Policy provides a great overview of the Strengthening Families framework in Strengthening Families 101. This framework is a research-informed approach to increase family strengths, enhance child development, and reduce the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. It is based on engaging families, programs, and communities in building five key Protective Factors:
- Parental resilience
- Social connections
- Knowledge of parenting and child development
- Concrete support in times of need
- Social and emotional competence of children
The Strengthening Families framework comes to life at the FRC through Parent Education, Financial Supports, and Outreach and Linkages.
- Parent Education – Triple P Positive Parenting Program: Providing parenting education/support to parents either individually or in groups with Triple P, an evidence-based model that has been shown to be effective with all populations. Key program elements and benefits of Triple P include the following:
- Dosage applied is directly correlated to the intensity of the services and the needs of the parent.
- Supports optimal child development, literacy, and school readiness with an emphasis on the importance of reading, physical and mental health, nurturing behaviors, and positive caregiving.
- Supports parents’ needs and desires regarding type, intensity and mode of parent support.
- Family-driven and has a positive and long-standing record for success.
- Comprehensive, multilevel system of family intervention for parents whose young children are at risk of developing disruptive behavior disorders.
- Strongest empirical support of any intervention with children, particularly those with conduct problems.
- Culturally competent.
Watch the video below to learn more about our Positive Parenting Program.
- Financial Supports: The Family Resource Center combines short-term financial assistance (concrete needs) and long-term help with case management and financial literacy. Combining both supports is crucial to helping low-income families.
- Strength-based approach to engage clients in resource assistance as recommended by the Child Welfare League of America (Child Welfare Information Gateway).
- Builds a parent’s self-efficacy & self-sufficiency, which can increase their ability to provide a safe and loving environment for their children.
- Ensures families’ concrete needs are met by allocating part of this funding towards assisting families with household expenses (i.e. rent, utilities, childcare, transportation, clothing, diapers).
- Community Health Workers at the FRC work one-on-one with parents, linking them to resources such as food, housing, counseling, childcare, employment, immigration and/or legal issues and public assistance.
- Community Health Workers advocate for the clients, help them navigate the system, and assist them in completing applications and paperwork.
- Outreach and Linkages: An important component of all FRC programs is to ensure linkages to child and family healthcare, early intervention services, screening for mental health, and any wellness needs.
- FRC Community Health Workers use the existing relationships with the Community Prevention Partner Collaborative to refer the students and families for services.
- Families of color typically face multiple inequities in access to and provision of adequate services. We promote outreach through the support systems within those communities to reduce stigma and normalize parent support.
- In planning and implementation of the FRC and all the programs and services offered, our attention is given to barriers such as: age, disabilities, language, culture, location, transportation. Staff schedule sessions to accommodate client needs, including meetings during evenings and weekends as well as traveling to clients’ homes. The FRC is staffed Monday through Saturdays with services provided in English and Spanish.
