On September 16, Bounce Coalition hosted a roundtable for CE&S grantees highlighting the latest findings on family engagement, youth well-being, and development in out-of-school programs. The event featured speakers from organizations included in our findings, including Yes Arts and Sowing Seeds with Faith.

Research consistently shows that when caring adults are actively involved in children’s lives, children experience stronger outcomes. Strong family connections can also build family resilience, or a family’s ability to adapt, cope and stay connected through stress and adversity. For youth-serving organizations, the question is not whether family engagement matters. Instead, it is how can we create family engagement that is both meaningful and consistent?

To explore that question, the Bounce Coalition partnered with Sowing Seeds with Faith (SSWF), a Louisville-based organization that helps young people thrive socially and academically. We partnered with SSWF because they have built an especially strong model for engaging parents through its parent council, known as “The Village.” While many youth-serving organizations struggle to engage parents, The Village includes more than 50 active parents.

Through focus groups and surveys, we set out to understand what makes that engagement successful, how parents and SSWF benefit from that engagement, and what other organizations could learn from it.

Key takeaways include: 

  • Family resilience is critical to cultivating strong and healthy child and adolescent development, and family engagement can build that resilience. This is backed by research showing improved education outcomes for kids whose parents are engaged, both at home through things like homework support, and at school through communication and involvement. Engaged families also build stronger social networks and community connections, which give them more resources to draw on when times get hard.

  • SSWF’s success with family engagement results from the trust they establish with parents. This came through overwhelmingly in our focus groups. Parents shared stories of staff joining school meetings to help advocate for their child, being welcomed back without judgment after stepping away from the council during busy times, and feeling like SSWF genuinely has their child’s best interest at heart. 

  • Engaging families with a focus on their strengths is an essential component that fosters successful parent engagement. SSWF approaches parents as capable, competent partners, not problems to fix. One parent told us, “They listen and they don’t judge.” 

  • Establishing a strong foundation of family engagement enables SSWF to undertake practices that boost resilience. With trust in place, SSWF could go further in the ways they support parents, such as bringing in outside experts, building community among parents, and tying programming directly to child needs and wants. In our survey, 94% of parents said expert-led information increased their confidence, while 78% said participating in The Village increased their confidence as parents. 

What can Kentucky organizations do?

  • Assess how your organization builds relational trust with families;
  • Identify practices to focus on family strengths and create a safe space for parents when they engage;
  • Build a community support network that cultivates staff-participant relationships;
  • Implement practices to demonstrate a shared priority on the well-being of children;
  • Create organizational systems that center family input in decision-making; and
  • Co-plan skill- and knowledge-building opportunities that are parent-informed and support parental development.

For Kentucky’s youth-serving organizations, meaningful family engagement is part of creating the support children and families need to thrive. When we listen to families, build trust, recognize their strengths, and make sure their voices are infused in the programs designed to support their children, we create stronger kids, families, and communities. 

You can learn more about SSWF’s work and opportunities to build family engagement and resilience here: Executive Summary Parent Engagement in Out-of-School Programs and Report Parent Engagement in Out-of-School Programs.