 | Families, Gender & Children Welcome to the Families, Gender, and Children section of CPN, which provides essays and case studies on the empowerment of women and families on a broad range of issues such as the overscheduling of children, familily violence, social services, and the civic role of family service professionals.Essays also examine the "new girls movement" today and the history of participatory democracy in the women's movement. Civic Perspectives Democracy and Diversity in Feminist Organizations: Learning from Three Decades of Practice.
by Carmen Sirianni, Lewis Friedland, and Andrea Walsh The Citizen Therapist and the Civic Renewal Movement (2002: 160 KB pdf). William Doherty, founder of the Families and Democracy Project at the University of Minnesota, examines the ways in which family therapists can expand their imagination of how to do civic work with families and communities. Civic professionalism at its best. Families and Democracy Project (2002: 68 KB pdf). Based upon a critique of the traditional provider/consumer models of family services, William Doherty offers case studies of families and communities engaged to reclaim control over their daily lives, such as the overscheduling of kids (Putting Family First) and caring for ill family members (Partners in Daibetes). From the journal Family Process. The New Girls Movement (2001: 236 KB pdf), by P. Catlin.Fullwood for the Collaborative Fund for Healthy Girls, Healthy Women and Ms. Foundation for Women. This report develops some of the core principles underlying the increasing number of projects aimed at empowering girls and young women, both in their general efforts to make real contributions to their communities and in their specific attempts to address issues such as sexual harassment, violence, and media-mediated body images that can disable girls and young women from being effective citizens and “authors of their own lives.” Democracy, Deliberation, and the Experience of Women. (1991)
by Jane Mansbridge Irony and Hope in the Emerging Family Policies: A Case for Family Empowerment Associations. (1995)
by Richard Kordesh Stories & Case Studies Dayton Daily News, "Kids in Chaos: A Community Response" In a six-month project focused on juvenile crime in metro Dayton, the Daily News has teamed up with WHIO-TV to discern public values and listen with renewed attention to citizen voices. The initiative included a series of community roundtables that drew more than 300 groups into the discussion, an "experts forum" where 200 area leaders involved with kids and with criminal justice brainstormed effective responses, and an ongoing series of reporting projects, major editorials and first-person stories about conditions affecting kids. Case study plus. Detroit Free Press, "Children First" The Free Press launched the newspaper-wide Children First campaign in January 1993. Ongoing reportage, undertaken by a team of four, includes a weekly Sunday Children First column and editorial content emphasizing solutions and offering help to readers. A youth panel and an advisory committee meet with and assist the team. An assistant to the publisher serves as full-time community liaison to the project. Newsroom staffers may allot two hours of their work week to volunteer in public schools. Case study plus. Dorchester CARES uses community-based and community organizing approaches to promote the well-being of young children. This paper reviews the applicability of community-based and community organizing approaches to the policy goal of preventing child abuse and neglect and enhancing the well-being of young children up to age three. It includes an in-depth case study of Dorchester CARES, which stands for key components of the model, namely Collaboration, Advocacy, Resource development, Education, and Services, and offers family strengthening programs and services. Case study plus. Maximum Feasible Parent Participation: This chapter from Head Start: The Inside Story of America's Most Successful Education Experiment by Edward Zigler and Susan Muenchow chronicles the history of the Head Start program's parent involvement policy. "Maximum feasible parent participation" suggests the role of the parent as a full partner with the paid professionals in the program, but is a role that stops short of exclusive control by the parents. Case study plus. Orphan Project Develops Community and Legal Support Systems for Parents and Foster Parents of Children Affected by AIDS. The Orphan Project, founded in New York City in 1991, has developed a collaborative model with agencies, hospitals, social service and volunteer groups to provide community and family supports, as well as policy changes, to meet the needs of the entire spectrum of children affected by AIDS—from dying infants to healthy adolescents. Grassroots groups, such as Mothers of Children with AIDS (MOCA), and large medical institutions, such as Montefiori Medical Center, have worked to develop forms of service and a standby guardian law that empower mothers with AIDS and foster parents in providing care and removing bureaucratic impediments. Story and case study plus. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Groups Use Dialogue and Shared Concerns to Find Common Ground. The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice grew out of a series of workshops for pro-life and pro-choice people by Search for Common Ground, first in Buffalo and later in St. Louis, Cleveland, Denver, Cincinnati, Pensacola and the Washington, D.C. area. The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice believes that the abortion conflict provides an opportunity for dialogue and creative problem-solving through facilitated dialogues and addressing shared concerns. Fundamental is that no one is ever asked to change his or her belief about the core issue of abortion. Story and Case study plus. Re-Linking Work and Family Catalyzes Organizational Change. The Re-linking Work and Family project and case study challenges the notions that work and family obligations are adversarial and that success—organizational, individual, and societal—lies in keeping the work and family spheres separate and distinct. By re-linking these spheres at several work—Xerox Corporation, Corning, Inc., and Tandem Computers, Inc.—sites this project provides an alternative vision of an ideal worker, a successful organization, and a functional, equitable society. Case study plus. Texas Council on Family Violence Builds Civic Partnerships with State Agencies. The Texas Council was founded as an organization that could work with both the Texas state government and local battered women's shelters. One of its top priorities has been to secure state funding for shelters, while at the same time creating a relationship with the Texas Department of Human Services to insure that battered women's shelters remain autonomous, community-based, and community-supported. The Council's work has helped the Texas government to act as a catalyst for civic efforts against family violence, not replacing them with government "owned" programs or, on the other hand, ignoring a public problem of such consequence. Story and case study plus. |
