Month: January 2018

Building Successful Relationships With Parents Through Motivational Interviewing

One of the most important roles of Family Service Workers and Home Visitors is to create effective working relationships with parents. We believe in meeting parents where they are. . .and creating a strong partnership with each parent in order to guide them to self-sufficiency. Home Visitors and Family Service Workers work closely with parents to identify their strengths and needs, set family goals and provide opportunities for parents to be fully engaged in the life of their child, including in their education.  Family participation is a powerful predictor of positive child outcomes and it directly impacts children’s school readiness.

Finding the right approach for effective work with parents starts with an ability to extend empathy… to understand where they are and where they want to go. We believe in engaging and building connections with families by initiating “rich” conversations. Create a safe environment for families to share their strengths and open up about areas of challenge. Take the time to work with parents to create solutions and offer support in a patient and helpful way. Discover what each family is all about and what is important to them – recognizing their strengths and needs.

It’s essential that Family Service Workers and Home Visitors have the needed skills in order to create successful relationships with parents. Motivational interviewing is one of those key skills.  Motivational interviewing is the process of helping people move through the stages of change. Motivational interviewing includes:

  • Learning how to collaborate and support change using specific skill-building techniques;
  • Improving how you show empathy through reflective listening.
  • Supporting a parent’s desire to change by learning how to establish discrepancy and rolling with resistance.

This highly interactive, practice-based training explores the principles and stages of motivational interviewing as well as motivators of change and transformation. Motivational interviewing is a great tool to have in your toolbox when establishing successful relationships with parents. Believing that a parent can change is powerful. However, supporting a parent’s belief that they can change themselves is empowering.

Are you looking for training on “Building Successful Relationships with Parents through Motivational Interviewing?” Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.

Creating Your Program’s Full Community Assessment

Your Community Assessment is one of the foundational elements of your program. It is used to make important decisions in your program regarding program design and service delivery. It is a critical document when writing your Refunding application, when writing a Recompetition grant application and when making programmatic decisions about selection criteria, enrollment slots, and types of services needed by children and families. It’s an essential document used for data-driven decision making and must include all needed data.

We create comprehensive Community Assessments for Head Start & Early Head Start programs as well as Community Action Agencies. They include all of the required items in the new Head Start Program Performance Standards (and, for Community Action Agencies, the regulations of your CAP programs). As all of our services are custom designed, we will include any additional data that you request.

Our Community Assessments include:

  • Aggregating and analyzing a multitude of data sources;
  • Comparing current data with past years’ data;
  • Colorful graphs and charts illustrating the data;
  • Key findings for each piece of data;
  • Surveys of your Staff, Policy Council, Board and Community Partners.

The Community Assessment will include an analysis of the data as well as an Executive Summary & much more – in a user-friendly format. Call or email us for a free sample!

Are you looking for a Full Community Assessment that will provide you with all of the data that you need to make critical programmatic decisions? We can take this off your to-do list and create it for you. Give us a call today at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.