The President’s Initiative on Children, Youth and Families
(PICYF) recently completed reviews of nearly 60 proposals submitted
in response to its Request for Proposals entitled “Disparities:
Unequal Opportunities, Unequal Outcomes.” This
granting program, administered through the Children, Youth and Family
Consortium (CYFC) which houses PICYF, is intended to seed small projects
that will promote understanding of or examine ways to effectively
address disparities, broadly defined, among Minnesota’s children,
youth and families. This program provides funds with the expectation
and hope that this seed money will be leveraged to obtain additional
resources, create impact in communities, enhance visibility of important
children, youth or family issues, and build partnerships.PICYF
was able to fund seven projects, ranging in cost from $3500 to $7500.
We believe that the seven projects selected reflect the breadth and
depth of issues that PICYF and CYFC seek to address. And we are confident
that these projects will make a significant contribution to this
important area of work.
The seven grantees are:
• Jessica Berge, Department of Family Medicine and
Community Health:
Parenting Partnerships is a community-University initiative
at the Broadway Family Medicine outpatient clinic in North Minneapolis.
This project originated when concerned parents at the Broadway clinic
asked for parenting classes to help reduce violence, drug/alcohol,
and mental health problems in their children. The parenting
classes are facilitated by a multidisciplinary team, including marriage
and family therapists (MFTs) and family practice residents. The
parenting classes are offered to all parents who attend the Broadway
clinic. The parenting classes include four elements: (a) parent
training (1 ½ hours each time), (b) child care with skills
training for the participants’ children, (c) a meal together,
and (d) an opportunity to mentor other parents in the community regarding
parenting skills after completion of the parenting classes. The
classes will run for 10 weeks. Four sequences of classes will
be offered over the one year grant period. Data will be collected
for the duration of the grant that will measure: (1) parenting stress
(measured by the parenting stress index; PSI), (2) child misbehavior
(including violence), mental health problems, drug/alcohol use, somatic
symptoms, and interpersonal distress (measured by the Youth Outcome
Questionnaire; Y-OQ), (3) family functioning (measured by the Family
Adjustment Device; FAD), and (4) marital distress (measured
by the Dyadic Adjustment Scale; DAS).
• James Boulger, Center for Rural Mental Health Studies,
UMD:
The
Center for Rural Mental Health Studies (CRMHS) is a multidisciplinary
mental health professional group committed to developing initiatives
in mental health care that are appropriate for rural settings. It
is well-documented that people living in rural areas often lack access
to mental health services and rely on their family physicians to
meet their mental health needs. This process results in frustration
for both the patient, who may require more intense mental health
care, and for physicians who lack access to immediate referral sources.
To
meet this need the CRMHS began in 2003 to provide rural Minnesota
residents with access to mental health services via interactive video
(termed telemental health). To date the Center has formed a telemental
health network with five rural primary health care clinics in Minnesota
(Scenic River Health Services located in both Cook and Bigfork, the
Littlefork Medical Center, the Paynesville Area Medical Clinic, and
the Duluth Clinic - Ely) to provide mental health services to these
underserved rural populations.
The
staff of the CRMHS have been asked to provide telemental health services
in various other rural locations throughout Minnesota. Currently,
the CRMHS feels it is in a position to expand and will provide telemental
health services to the families and youth seeking treatment at the
Allina - Mora Medical Clinic. Mora Minnesota currently has no primary
mental health providers. The grant award from the President’s
Initiative on Children, Youth & Families will allow the CRMHS
this expansion.
• Cynthia Cattell, School of Physics and Astronomy:
PACES, “Parents
and Children Experiencing Science”, is a program designed to
promote science education in under-represented communities in a format
where parents model learning for their children. This format allows
young children (pre-k through 3rd grade) to see their own parent
valuing an educational experience and finding that science is fun
and exciting. The goal is to insure that the parent and child will
view themselves as confident co-learners of science. Short courses
(45 – 60 minutes) promote critical thinking for both the parent
and the child in a non-threatening format. The emphasis is on parents
and children jointly making observations and generating questions.
It is intended to be a format where parents model the curiosity,
focused involvement and enjoyment of learning.
The program is mobile. All materials and teachers go to the communities
where parents and children can be brought together.
There
are several long term goals of this program:
- To help parents view themselves as an integral part of the
learning experiences of their children.
- To provide academic opportunities for young children and parents.
- To help build stronger student attachment to schools and learning
experiences.
PACES focuses on communities that are economically disadvantaged
and exhibiting the greatest disparities in academic achievement among
their students.
• Carolyn Garcia, School of Nursing:
Despite availability and existence of Latino-serving health and
social service agencies in the Twin Cities, reduction of health disparities
and improved health of Latino youth/families has been modest. The
goal of this new and developing University-community collaborative
is to eliminate health disparities and simultaneously promote healthy
Latino youth development. We see this occurring as a result of combining
research with strategic systems-level planning that looks beyond
individual organizational impact to a future of integrated comprehensive
delivery of evidence-based, culturally meaningful clinic-, community-,
and school-based services.
We intend to hold a one-day Healthy Latino Youth Development Summit
in the Twin Cities bringing together invited representatives of community
organizations and university departments concerned with the health
disparities experienced by Latino youth and their families. The purpose
of the Summit is to accomplish strategic grant and system-level planning
and dialogue through an intensive one-day facilitated process. This
Summit will serve as a launching point upon which collective ideas
can translate into strategic initiatives including system-level change
in how health disparities are addressed, healthy Latino youth development
is promoted, and federal grants are collaboratively sought.
The goals of the Summit are to:
- Generate increased focus on health disparities for Latino youth
and their families
- Develop a strategic plan that identifies ways in which participating
organizations can collectively make changes that will have an effect
on health disparities
- Develop a participatory research agenda to support improved understanding
of health disparities and promotion of healthy development for
Latino youth in Minnesota
- Develop a collaborative partnership between the community organizations
and University researchers that can be sustained over at least
the next 5 years resulting in successful applications for federal
or large foundation grants.
• Nicole La Voi, Tucker Center on Girls and Sports:
Youth sports can provide a positive, meaningful context for youth
development and family engagement through a sense of belonging and
connection to community and civic life, and an appreciation for the
importance of working together with diverse groups of people to achieve
success. All of these well-documented benefits can translate into
the classroom and into adult lifestyles in an ethnically and religiously
pluralistic society in ways that foster academic achievement, and
long-term physical, emotional and social well being. However, the
influence can be negative due to such things as a hostile sport climate
or poorly trained coaches, or may also be minimal or non-existent,
as many barriers prevent some children from engaging in youth sport
altogether — resulting in disparate child outcomes. The primary
goal of this project is to forge new connections and create synergy
among U of M researchers, the Minnesota Youth Soccer Association
(MYSA) and community members and leaders in Minneapolis in order
to identify challenges and barriers that prevent or limit children
of diverse ethnic backgrounds from participating in youth soccer.
Soccer is currently one of the fastest growing and most recognized
sports worldwide, and the MYSA is “the” recreational
and travel level soccer provider in the state. Focus
groups acting as “informants” will discuss their “situated
knowledge”, experiences, perceptions and ideas for making soccer
more accessible and equitable. In addition, participants will discuss
how to create a more tolerant climate that will in sum help in the
formation of policy and programmatic recommendations.
• Kent Pekel, Consortium for Post-Secondary Academic
Success:
The
University’s Consortium for Postsecondary Academic Success
will sponsor a Minnesota College Access Summit on May 18, 2007, in
partnership with the Minnesota Minority Education Partnership (MMEP).
Additional funding for the summit is being provided by the 3M Foundation.
The objective of the Minnesota College Access Summit is to address
disparities in rates of enrollment in and graduation from institutions
of higher education by bringing together a diverse group of community
organizations, schools, districts and institutions of higher education
to launch the Minnesota College Access Network (MCAN). This important
new organization will provide ongoing coordination of and support
for college access programs across the state. Participants in the
summit will also gain an understanding of the disparities in preparation
for and access to higher education that exist in Minnesota along
racial, socioeconomic and linguistic lines and effective strategies
for reducing those disparities.The Summit will feature a keynote
address, an update on the state of college access programming in
Minnesota and around the nation and breakout sessions that focus
on key aspects of preparing all students for postsecondary academic
success.
• Esther Wattenberg, School of Social Work:
“Addressing the Best Interests of the Child in Immigrant and
Refugee Families” is a state-wide forum to be held during the
fall semester, 2008, to discuss findings from an exploratory study
of child welfare issues in immigrant families. This event will provide
a forum to discuss practice and policy issues in protecting the best
interests of children in families whose culture, immigrant experiences,
and uncertain legal status create a complex family environment for
child welfare decisions. The focus of attention will be seven rural
counties that have been identified as having a recent upsurge of
Hispanic, Somali, and Southeast Asian families. One of the major
issues to be addressed is the family’s reluctance to access
and respond to services when child protection issues are reported.
The extent to which an overburdened and under-funded rural child
welfare staff can respond to this population of underserved children,
when parents’ immigration status is uncertain, will be addressed.
These issues will also be especially relevant to the health and education
systems.
In preparation for this state-wide meeting, a network of University
resources and community agencies interested in child welfare issues
of immigrant and refugee families will be invited to a consultative
luncheon to review findings from the DHS study. This network will
include: Public Health; Family Social Science; College of Education
and Human Development; Institute of Child Welfare; Law School; and
School of Social Work.
Findings from the Minnesota Department of Human Services-funded
exploratory study and proceedings from the state conference, above,
will provide the requisite data to develop a federally-funded project
on protecting children in immigrant families.
We look forward to following the progress of these projects and
advancing our collective understanding of how to reduce the disparities
that compromise the health and well-being of so many children and
families today.
