Family Engagement and Leadership Framework
Building with, and not for families is impactful work that benefits communities, families and children. Imbedded in the Smart Start value-system is a family-centered mentality that recognizes that when families are seen as partners, organizations achieve sustainable outcomes for children.
As a part of NC’s Preschool Development Grant in 2019, community agencies in the Smart Start Network received funds to assess their current level of family engagement and leadership opportunities and then develop action plans to expand family-centered activities within their programs and systems building work. As the NC Family Engagement and Leadership Framework was being developed, it was being piloted within the Network, across 10 Local Partnerships and their local coalitions.
View the Family Engagement and Leadership Framework
The NC Family Engagement and Leadership Framework is a roadmap for pursuing family centered, family-led work. It allows agencies and programs to consider ways to engage with and learn from the primary adults in a child’s life. The goal is that families experience support in building knowledge about services available and choices, so that they are able to develop leadership skills to advocate for children, themselves, and for systems’ improvement as a whole. The Guiding Principles demonstrate what family engagement and leadership look like when it is prioritized within organizations. The Principles allowed Local Partnerships and their coalitions to evaluate their own practices and encourage participating agencies to do the same. In this way, parents knew what to look for when interacting with family-serving agencies.
These “Early Adopter” Local Partnerships convened a monthly group of cross-sector stakeholders with a minimum of 20% parent representatives to work alongside a state coalition while developing plan to implement elements of the state framework. These local coalitions successfully worked to enhance ongoing relationships between family-serving agencies and the parents and children they serve. The local coalitions allowed for peer-to-peer connections to be developed and increased families’ knowledge of services available to them and their children. The local coalitions created action plans to address their community’s needs based on data they collected from landscape scans.
