Training & FAQs
This page contains Study Guides and Powerpoint slideshows. The study guides provide ideas and questions for facilitators to consider as they prepare. They are designed to be used in addition to the Facilitator Manual for additional insights, team planning and “Best Practices.”
Yes! We believe this program will be most successful to your community if you incorporate local cultural values and teachings. This program is a culturally specific approach to: strengthen family interactions, teach parenting skills, discuss refusal skills, identify coping mechanisms, and re-connect generations. Depending on your communities needs or goals, this may require considerable modification to assure your program is age appropriate, culturally relevant, and logistically feasible.
You can, but we believe part of the benefit of the program is families creating lasting connections from spending 14 weeks together. Completing the program in a shorter time-frame will allow families to receive the teachings and lessons, but may not provide ample opportunity for families to reconnect with other community members.
Yes, but one positive outcome of the meal is that families are more likely to attend on time and it is an additional incentive to participating (especially during the week when evenings are very busy after work and school). Communities have used different methods for this meal, including hiring a local cook, catering from a local business, or pot-luck style meals where each family brings one dish to share. The meal can be important for many reasons: 1) it is a nice way to promote community and mingle with families in a positive and fun atmosphere, 2) it helps families be able to attend with less stress before the meeting, 3) it provides an extra incentive for families where hunger may be an issue, and 4) it promotes teamwork among families as they help set-up before and clean-up after the meal.
This program could also be adapted for use with just children or adults to supplement existing parenting or prevention programs. We have had the best experience when families attend the sessions together.
The breakout activities are meant to provide time for youth and parents to discuss age appropriate material separately. It offers support and exchange of ideas, as well as learning new skills that may help participants in their family roles. The Adult Activities focus on parenting skills and the Youth Activities are fun and engaging educational opportunities used to illustrate and teach important skills.
We suggest that group activities be split into age appropriate groups so that (1) older adolescents who may already be experimenting with negative behaviors do not have the opportunity to influence others and/or (2) young children do not significantly distract from the program teachings. The ideal ages for this program are between 8 – 12 years old.
An initial implementation of this prevention showed promising results for children (aged 10 – 12 years) who had not yet begun to experiment with alcohol or drugs. Our current RCT is now beginning to assess the impacts for children (aged 8 – 10 years), but results will not be available for some time. We believe the content and tools provided in this program benefit all ages, although we believe younger children benefit more from the prevention than older age groups.
Definitely not, but we have found that the children and adults are more likely to complete take home activities, and youth are more likely to encourage their parents to attend each week, when there is the opportunity to win prizes for their participation. We have raffled small and large items, including legos, art sets, fishing gear, kites, sleds, t-shirts, tablets, kindles, and even musical instruments.
Our experience shows that to successfully run this program it requires at least three facilitators, but preferably four.
On average, we recommend facilitators commit 2 hours ahead of each session to prepare. Each session may last up to 3 hours, so the time commitment per session may range from 5-6 hours, when you include both set-up and clean-up.
Absolutely not. We suggest you make the graduation ceremony memorable and special for families, but this could take the form of any number of celebration activities. Your community should adapt this to fit your needs. In our graduation ceremony description, you will notice that it says the corner of the blanket is cut off for parents to keep. This was an example of a special adaptation for a community who sewed start quilts for the youth with one corner missing and a separate corner that the parents received when their children were blanketed.
