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Irony and Hope in the Emerging Family Policies, continued

Index

Preface
Overview: What Does Family Empowerment Mean?
I. The New Family Policy Agenda: More Supportive Than Empowering
II. To Empower Families
III. Family Empowerment and Community Building
IV. Family Empowerment Associations
V. Where to Begin?
Conclusion: Repositioning Families into the Missing Middle
References
Appendix

Contents

IV. Family Empowerment Associations
V. Where to Begin?
Conclusion: Repositioning Families into the Missing Middle
References
Appendix

IV: Family Empowerment Associations

Introduction
Empowerment within the Current Structure of Policies
Attributes and Goals of Empowering Associations
Building a Family Empowerment Association: A Scenario

Introduction

Family empowerment associations are needed to help families produce goods for their own members and contribute to community building. As the case of a new family center opening in an eastern city illustrates, there are opportunities for, and obstacles to, mounting family empowerment projects from within formal family support programs. As the case of the Child Care and Development Block Grant illustrates, there are biases against family empowerment, even in policies that emphasize family support principles. Family empowerment associations would be consistent with family support principles, but would give families vehicles through which to exercise their productive and community building capacities in the economic, political, and religio-cultural domains, as well as the social domain.

Families require stronger institutional bases from which to care for their own members and contribute to community building. One type of institutional base proposed herein is a family empowerment association. As described in this section, there are serious limits to mounting family empowerment activities from within programs and policies that are highly reflective of the new systems reforms. Analyzing those limits sets the stage for describing family empowerment associations. The following description illustrates the process of building and maintaining this type of association. It was chosen for review because it is representative of the type of program now being encouraged by many states as they implement the new human service system reforms.

A new "family center" is about to begin operations in a poor, inner-city school.[1] Although the family center is meant to be primarily a family support program, it also was designed in some respects to help parents from the neighborhood begin changing the neighborhood itself. Revealing both the family support principles and family empowerment principles in planning for this family center can demonstrate the potential of family empowerment associations as extensions of family support programs. It also highlights the dilemmas that emerge from efforts to encourage family empowerment through a formal organization such as a family center.

In many respects, the family center's design reflects best practice principles for family support programs. The core staff of the family center are four family development specialists. These staff make home visits, do family assessments, conduct parent education, arrange parent support groups, and set up referrals to health and human services. Their clients are families of young children, not just the young children. The center provides "one-stop-shopping" for services in the neighborhood. The family development specialists manage caseloads of 25 families each, but information and referral is to be available to anyone from the neighborhood. Linkages have been made with county-based family preservation services. A community youth worker on the center's staff organizes exercise classes and support groups for adolescents on site. The youth worker also disseminates information about available services through a periodic newsletter and through "on-the-street" contacts. Referral agreements are being improved between a nearby primary health center and families with children in the school.

Whereas the above program elements are fairly representative of a contemporary family support program, the difficulty in building the nexus between family support and family empowerment becomes apparent when the parents' visions for the center are considered. Thirty-three percent of the Center's board will be composed of parents. Thus far, there is an apparent divergence of views between parents and the program administrators with respect to the larger purpose of the family center. These views may clash as the center evolves. A number of parents were quite active in meetings that led up to the design and submission of the proposal for funding. As one young father wrote in a letter of support that was attached to the proposal, "this proposed family center is the stepping stone for the reconstruction of our community . . . I look forward to the unification of my community to make this center a complete success." Another wrote: "I view the center as a place to pull our community together, to make it a better, safer environment for our children who live here. I see the opportunity for employment for interested Community People such as myself. I see it as a chance to grow and the chance to make a difference."

Where the parents tend to see the center as a potential base for the rebuilding of their community, the administrators tend to see the center as a site for service delivery to families. There had been wide-ranging discussion among parents and professionals prior to the proposal's submission about the community organizing that could take place from the center.

Some parents and professional social workers (not those who would have to run the center) advocated having a full-time community organizer on the staff. As one agency director wrote:

In our services to children and families we could provide input on a regular basis to the Family Center's Community Organizer which we believe would be mutually beneficial in empowering the families to improve the social and environmental factors that have a negative impact on the children's growth and development and the families' well being.

Parents also explicitly used the term "family empowerment" during these discussions: they viewed the role of organizer as critical to developing a sense of community ownership of the center and to helping people work on conditions in the neighborhood that have led to family problems. However, program administrators balked at having a community organizer on staff and instead proposed making community organizing part of the Family Education Coordinator's (the center's chief administrator) job description. The administrators' definition of community organizing differed somewhat from the parents'. To the latter, community organizing meant mobilizing families to address neighborhood problems, while to the former it meant, as finally stated in the proposal, "integrating the links between different services provided by different agencies and ensuring that these services are easily understood and accessed by families." Moreover, according to language used in the proposal ultimately submitted by the administrators, "through the community organizing work of the Family Education Coordinator and the Community Youth Worker, (the center) will become the central point of information and referral for area families to access these services."

Hypothetically, there is potential for broader family empowerment through the family center. The center's governing board will sponsor periodic community workshops and an annual town meeting to discuss broader neighborhood issues and school community relations. The parents expect the home visits conducted by the family development specialists to lead the program to confront such problems as poverty, unemployment, housing decay, high neighborhood crime rates, and other variables in the neighborhood that make family life difficult to manage.

What will be the role of the family center itself in addressing such community-level issues if they are raised at town meetings? It is apparent that some of the parents who have been active thus far in the center's development believe that the governing board should address such issues as housing deterioration or crime. At present, there is no viable neighborhood association to handle economic development or housing issues. Will the school administration or the agency operating the center be willing to allow its own program and facility to serve as a base for broader organizing? Is the state agency, the sponsor of the grant program, willing to underwrite this kind of community organizing? At this point it is unclear how the parents, administrators, and other governing board members will resolve these issues.

How would a family center eventually serve as an organizing base for the tackling of neighborhood issues by families? Here's one scenario. First, the governing board of the family center votes to broaden its statement of mission to include community economic development objectives. Formation of a subsidiary corporation is considered whose purpose is to acquire and rehabilitate homes and commercial properties in the neighborhood. This corporation would seek funds to train parents enrolled with the family development specialists in home repair and maintenance. Some of the poor, single mothers on the caseloads of family development specialists could be organized to form a day care cooperative. These mothers could acquire properties and set up family day care sites. Imagine further that as the board became more knowledgeable of housing and economic development issues, it could become more adept at critiquing city plans and zoning regulations that affect the neighborhood. In such a scenario, the family center may evolve into a school-based family empowerment association, even as it continued to serve as a family support program.

Many obstacles currently exist that could make this scenario highly unlikely:

• the staff who will run the family center have little experience with community development issues, and see themselves almost exclusively as direct service providers;

• the school board and administration would at the very least look skeptically upon such activities being run by a school based program;

• it would be difficult to build community development programs into a human service center—typically, city and state economic development agencies do not work with human service programs (in fact, the city tends to see the proliferation of human services in the inner city as detrimental to its efforts to attract businesses to the area);

• at the state level, economic development and human services are often seen as wholly separate domains of policy development; and

• the agency administering the family center would likely fear jeopardizing its relations with the state and city if it became a base for community organizing.

Parents who aspire to use the family center as a base for family empowerment will find many such obstacles "from above." Such obstacles could lead them to create a separate neighborhood association or community development corporation for addressing such issues. In fact, some of the same parents did attempt to start a "parent resource program" on their own, but could not obtain funding. One mother recently lamented that the family empowerment she had hoped would result from the funded family center would have been a guaranteed component of the parent resource program she would have started with her neighbors.

Creating institutions separate from the family center to carry out political and economic empowerment would acknowledge the limitations of the family center as a base for family empowerment. It also would separate the economic and political empowerment activities from the stable funding streams that will support the family center.

From a purely conceptual standpoint, there is nothing particularly logical about segregating social, economic, political, and religio-cultural forms of empowerment into different institutions. As one parent said during a planning meeting, "these problems all go together." Unfortunately, the illogic of this separation is often more apparent to unschooled parents than to highly schooled program administrators. It is perpetuated by regulations, professional specialties, the mindsets of bureaucrats, and the power of funders.

This example of a new family center illustrates both the potential and the pitfalls inherent in trying to mount family empowerment activities through formal organizations primarily designed on family support principles. The potential lies in the sensitizing of staff and administrators to the perspectives of real families who more naturally see problems holistically. The pitfalls are found in the barriers listed earlier.

Empowerment within the Current Structure of Policies: The Case of the Child Care and Development Block Grant

The earlier description of a family center demonstrated the difficulties of mounting family empowerment activities at the local level through a formal family support program. At the federal and state levels, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) illustrates many of the strengths of the system reforms now underway in states and localities. It also exemplifies how this type of structure may not necessarily construct opportunities for family empowerment.

Provisions

CCDBG was one of several child care provisions enacted within the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA). Other provisions included the expansion of child care assistance within Title IV-A for JOBS program recipients, the expansion of three tax credit programs, and a significant expansion of funding for the Head Start program. Initially adopted as a five-year program, CCDBG disburses funds to states for three purposes: to increase the supply of subsidized child care (75% of the grant); to encourage the creation of new early childhood programs and before-and-after school programs (about 20%); and to improve the quality of child care. Developing the state plans for the CCDBG prompted states to initiate collaborative policymaking across many agencies (human services, education, health, and others) that traditionally had not been involved in joint planning (Gormley, 1992). Many states have used the 20 percent discretionary category to create school-based programs, including family centers and other kinds of parent support services.

CCDBG was well-suited to encouraging many of the reform principles alluded to in this monograph. It encouraged cross-system planning, involving not only the various child care programs (Title XX, Title IV-A, and state-based programs) but early health programs and the JOBS program as well. Creating "seamless" systems was facilitated by the requirements for comprehensive child care plans; local agencies that managed the various child care programs had to be created or strengthened to help parents (using the newly mandated vouchers under CDBG) understand their options, not only in terms of possible eligibility for certain programs, but also with respect to the purchase of services from selected local providers.

CCDBG also encouraged a greater mixing of formal and informal systems in child care delivery by allowing parents to purchase services from informal family day care providers as well as from formal centers. The legislation affirmed reform principles by giving states considerable discretion with respect to setting standards (although this is an example of an area in which reform principles may clash: discretion yields flexibility, but flexibility might allow a state to ignore important standards of quality). Furthermore, CCDBG allowed states to experiment with new family support programs, such as school-based family centers. Through the creation of such centers, many states have been able to expand family visiting, case management, parent education, and other highly flexible programs designed explicitly to promote the principles of system reform. In addition, CCDBG made child care more "customer-driven" by requiring states to provide vouchers to parents and by expanding resource and referral programs.

Roles Emphasized by CCDBG

Yet, CCDBG also reveals how a structure that is well-suited to the promotion of family-centered programs from the standpoint of family support principles also can be quite limited as a vehicle through which to promote family empowerment. A review of the roles emphasized by CCDBG for parents, children, providers, and administrators illustrates how most of the empowerment generated by CCDBG is channeled into the roles of providers and administrators.

• Parent-Consumer Roles are constructed by CCDBG, emphasizing a significant but distinctively limited form of empowerment exercised most often during the initial selection of the provider (through the use of vouchers). While states and providers are not constrained from instituting more empowering roles for parents, the federal policy does not construct any roles for parents beyond their consumer roles.

• Director Caregiving Roles are constructed indirectly by CCDBG by expanding the supply of subsidized slots. CCDBG does allow more flexibility in the use of family day care, which in some cases will indirectly support family-based care. Where family-based care is actually being delivered within the consumer's own family (such as by a grandmother), CCDBG can be credited with empowering families in a critical productive capacity. However, the majority of caregiving roles have been taken by non-family providers.

• Resource and Referral Specialist Roles have been constructed and expanded due to CCDBG; these indirectly strengthen the parents' consumer roles by making information about options available to them.

• Family and Parent Educator Roles have been constructed and expanded due to CCDBG, but while such roles do encourage the development of more sensitive services, they do not on their own constitute roles through which parents exercise their productive and caregiving capacities. Even in cases where "para-professional" staff (many of whom were parents who could approach clients as peers) were utilized to fill these roles, the staff represent a small portion of the roles structured by CCDBG.

• State Planning and Administrative Roles were constructed and expanded due to CCDBG, giving agency officials expanded capacity to improve their cross-system planning. CCDBG helped legitimate inter-agency working groups and other collaborative bodies within states that were already working on integrating various child care, health, and welfare initiatives. CCDBG further empowered such groups to pursue these important reforms, but these rarely involve parents. While CCDBG offers some limited empowering roles for parents through the vouchers and by making family day care eligible for subsidies, it places most significant productive responsibilities—standard setting, program design, service delivery, planning, priority setting—under the control of formal systems. While some of the roles are designed to enable parents to assume more productive capacities (the parent educator roles in some family centers, for instance), the vast majority structure and reinforce the consumer role for families.

Attributes and Goals of Empowering Associations

As suggested by the previous comments about CCDBG, revitalizing communities through family empowerment requires building up new family empowerment associations (FEAs). A family empowerment association would be a freestanding, democratically governed, voluntary association comprised of families from a specified geographical community. Its purpose would be the empowerment of those families through the building up of their productive capacities (as previously defined). By strengthening those capacities, the associations would give families institutional vehicles through which to interact with formal institutions more equitably. Although American localities are rich with a wide diversity of voluntary associations, many associations do not embrace families as members. Most do not focus explicitly on family empowerment as their central purpose.

Attributes of Family Empowerment Associations

To serve as vehicles for community building around families, family empowerment associations would need to meet the following criteria.

• To draw on the potentially unifying "power of place," they would need to be clearly identified with neighborhoods or community areas.

• To promote family rather than individualistic perspectives in program development, they would need to be organized on the basis of family memberships, rather than individual memberships.

• To strengthen community among families, family empowerment associations would need to be open to all families in the areas in which they were based.

• To make empowerment common practice, voting and decision making would need to be democratic (majoritarian or consensus-based), with all ages having opportunities to somehow contribute to decision making.

• To be consistent with developmentally appropriate practices, children and adolescents would not have to be given decision making power equal to that of the adults (however, there would likely be many issues on which families could deliberate or even vote as families).

Goals of Family Empowerment Associations

Although family empowerment associations could pursue many goals, they would emphasize family productivity as a foundational purpose. Other capacities would be undergirded by enhanced productivity in various domains. The revitalization of family productivity also would distinguish family empowerment associations from other voluntary associations in which families traditionally participate. The following goals begin with strengthening capacities and then move to other purposes that could be served as well.

Goal 1: Revitalize family productivity. Through cooperative associations, families could be more capable of growing and distributing food, building and repairing housing, producing child care, teaching children skills of many types, developing plans for neighborhood design, producing positions on public issues, creating informal worship services or cultural celebrations, and creating many other social, economic, political, and religio-cultural goods. Making families more productive also would indirectly improve the effectiveness of formal organizations. Through their own enhanced productive activities, families would be better able to instill strong work habits in their members. By making conversation about internal policies as well as association policies common practice, families would be more capable of encouraging strong citizenship with respect to formal political institutions. By structuring religious rituals and other cultural practices (story telling, artistic activity), families make their members more capable of participating in formal congregation activities and cultural organizations.

Goal 2: Revitalize family care and mutual support. Families organized in mutual benefit associations could help one another in emergencies and with various caregiving demands. These practices also would help buttress formal organizations by making it less necessary for families to turn to businesses, physicians, and schools to solve their problems. Lessening demand for critical services would allow formal organizations to concentrate on solving more serious problems.

Goal 3: Give families autonomous channels of influence with formal systems. As they are now, families are notoriously private institutions. This privatism has both benefits and costs to families. As organizations such as Parent ACTION have recognized, it is extremely difficult to induce parents to think of their role as parents as having an ongoing (rather than reactive, crisis driven) public dimension. Parents viewed individuals who promote interests that derive from their professional, occupational, and ethnic orientations as having legitimate political activities.

Goal 4: Renew community among families. As defined in section II, community emerges among diverse people through practices that strengthen common mission, shared history, attachment to a shared place, shared values, and a spirit of connectedness. Through the voluntariness and openness of new informal associations, families would become more practiced in joint tasks and democratic decisions, working out goals and projects that would strengthen families.

Goal 5: Renew community among families and formal organizations. It takes more than civility or caring to build community: it also takes power. As isolated individual units, limited in time and influence as they are, families are simply neither organized nor equipped to relate to school systems, hospitals, businesses, agencies, or churches on a basis that would induce the formal institutions to engage in mutualistic, democratic community building with them. Through family empowerment associations, families could approach the formal systems with sufficient power to induce the cooperativeness and openness necessary for shared decisions and practices. The empowering associations themselves would need to stress internal integration and comprehensiveness. Although families in a particular neighborhood or small municipality may effectively pursue these goals through different empowering associations, it is more likely that they may do so effectively through a single association that gradually built its various capacities through networks of subsidiaries. By building various activities into a single association, the energies of various families could be focused more efficiently and fragmentation of effort could be avoided. In addition, building various productive and caregiving activities into a single association would encourage the mutually enhancing effects of the various capacities. The productive activities would form the basis for executing the other capacities.

Building A Family Empowerment Association: A Scenario

Imagine that the parents referred to in the earlier depiction of the family center had been able to form a family empowerment association in their neighborhood that was separate from the family center. What might such an association look like? How might it form and stay viable? How might it relate to the family center?

One of the problems voiced repeatedly by neighborhood residents was the large number of single teen-aged parents who live in poverty and have few parenting skills. Another constant (and legitimate) complaint was the absence of a decent, accessible supermarket. Most residents have to travel to distant suburban supermarkets for their groceries and other basic household items.

Residents usually cannot start supermarkets on their own, but they can form food cooperatives, especially if space, materials, and technical assistance are available. They can also grow their own food, given the right skills and resources. Imagine then that the parents who were active in helping to plan the family center were able to obtain funds to visit with other parents in the neighborhood and gained their support in forming a SOIC(3) corporation called Washington Food and Garden (or WFG), Inc.

The association would form its own board composed of parents and youths whose families had paid dues to join the organization. All WFG members would agree to take on particular roles, such as packing food (which would arrive in bulk and would need to sorted for purchase by members), cleaning, handling sales, and other tasks. Perhaps WFG would obtain two empty lots in the neighborhood from the city for gardening; some members would volunteer to tend the garden. All parents and children (school-age and above) would have some productive roles to play. Some parents might supervise the children of others working in the "store."

This would require good management. Three coordinator roles thus would be taken by parents willing to be more involved: the food store coordinator, the gardening coordinator, and the child care coordinator. The coordinators would receive modest stipends for their work, which would be more time-consuming than the other roles. Gardening, participating in the food co-op, and caring for one another's children would encourage the formation of a kind of camaraderie among members. The governing board would sponsor occasional open meetings for the discussion of neighborhood issues. The residents would discover that they share many other concerns, such as the poor quality of parks and playgrounds in the neighborhood. A small committee might form to begin considering positions the group might take to the city to advocate improvements in the neighborhood playgrounds. They might even consider proposing the construction of a playground adjacent to the garden.

Because WFG, Inc. would have established its credibility as an organization, and because of the obvious camaraderies that would have developed among members, the city planners would have to take serious note of the group's proposals about parks and playgrounds. They might agree to work with the group to formulate a proposal for the following year's Community Development Block Grant application. The agreement might include leasing a new play lot next to WFG's garden to the association, with the association agreeing to maintain and supervise it.

As depicted in Figure 2 [not available online], the family empowerment association would have reached a point where it had built up four interrelated activities: involving families in studying and advocating for design changes in the neighborhood (playgrounds, crosswalks, safe alleys, or other changes); gardening; running the food cooperative; and sponsoring a child care network.

Because it is hypothetical, the above scenario could, of course, run on endlessly, with the association taking on other productive activities. However, let's consider why such associations rarely form in actual practice. Curiously, none of the individual projects tackled by the associations are on their own utopian or inordinately complex. There are many food cooperatives around the country. Community gardening is a growing movement. Compared with many local agencies that manage multiple funding streams and many different programs, the organization itself would be relatively simple in design.

So, what would keep parents from starting such an association? Mainly, the virtual absence in any accessible way of the following resources:

• Technical assistance, including legal, organization development, food management, gardening, property management, and fiscal assistance.
• Resource or lending pools for seeds, tools, and capital.
• Access to property, including buildings and grounds.

This is not to say that particular resources would not be available in particular localities. There are probably lawyers who could do the incorporation papers "pro-bono." There are extension agents to help with gardening. There are accountants to help set up books. A seed company might donate seed. A home improvement store might donate tools. Cities and private property owners do lease, sell, and sometimes donate properties to voluntary associations.

What may not be available is a policy that would make it common practice to organize these resources to help families form such corporations. Currently, resources—knowledge, tools, capital—are badly organized, if organized at all, to help empower families to mount their own productive enterprises. In contrast, resources are very well organized to build and expand schools, start new social service programs, expand hospitals, and build other institutions that have grown at the expense of family capacities. Public policies are needed to help change this imbalance in the organization of resources.

Some might protest that activities to be undertaken by family empowerment associations are already run by many churches and local agencies. Indeed, many such activities are already in place in many neighborhoods. Multi-service centers, community development corporations, churches, and other local institutions sponsor some of the activities noted earlier. However, few are conducted by institutions that meet the criteria of family empowerment associations.

Most critically, what tends to happen in many neighborhoods is that the productive roles—organizing the cooperatives, managing the tutoring, making home visits, setting the agendas for the meetings on neighborhood plans—are usually controlled by the staff of the formal organizations, with residents remaining entangled in more passive, consumer roles. The voluntary associations run by the residents are often left with the residual activities that the formal organizations cannot find funding for or will not assume for fear of losing funding. The momentum toward family empowerment that seems evident when such programs are initiated becomes diverted as formal organizations (often adopting very informal names) control the productive roles through their own staff. Making family empowerment possible is therefore a problem of institutional design and institution building, and a matter of public policy. Since the goal is empowerment, the problem does not simply center on deciding which activities are to be carried out to help families. More critically, the question is this: who will decide and produce what families want and need?

V. Where to Begin?

Introduction
Policies and Family Empowerment Associations

Introduction

Family empowerment associations could be started from within organizations already dedicated to family or community empowerment. From neighborhood organizations, chapters of Parent ACTION, or family centers, they could be formed as extensions of existing organizations or could be spun-off's autonomous associations. Federal, state, and local governments could offer a number of direct and indirect resources to help form family empowerment associations. States in particular would be uniquely positioned to help nurture them.

Institutions already exist in many localities that could serve as "hosts" for new empowering associations. Many organizations already carry out some of the activities proposed for family empowerment associations (FEAs). Also, many organizations have adopted some of the decision making procedures or other attributes of empowering associations. Yet, few combine the various attributes and activities needed to pursue the mission proposed here. What starting points are needed for the building of and experimenting with family empowerment associations?

Possible Host Organizations

Numerous institutions currently exist that could help form FEAs, either as new institutions or as spin-offs of themselves.

Some family resource programs already exhibit many features attributed here to family empowerment associations. As noted previously, the Family Resource Coalition (FRC) is at the national forefront of the family support movement. FRC recognizes the potential in many family support programs for instituting broader empowerment activities. Because of its emphasis on genuine parent empowerment, attachment to a community, openness to all families in a locality, and broad scope of programming, FRC is also helping to nurture some family resource programs to the point where they are fulfilling some of the purposes of family empowerment associations. FRC may now be better positioned than any other organization to study how family support programs can evolve into family empowerment associations and to help further that evolution.

As argued in section I, the bridging activity between family support and family empowerment often seems to be the social empowerment enabled by family centers and family resource programs. This initial seeding of empowerment takes place through the development of parenting skills and the abilities to form informal support networks around such issues as child care. This enabling potential is described thoroughly by Dunst et al. (1988), especially as manifested by mutual support networks among parents.

In his study of the Family Matters program, Cochran (1987) describes how a family support program not only improved the educational outcomes of children and improved parents' mutual support networks, but also led to broader empowerment activities for parents by holding neighborhood cluster meetings. As he describes it (1992, p. 83):

After two years of participation, children in the families are doing better in first grade than children from similar backgrounds in a comparison group. This difference is strongest for children with the least educated parents. Parents' perceptions of themselves as parents are higher and their social networks have grown more in the program than in the comparison group, especially if they are single parents. Changes also occurred at the neighborhood level; playgrounds were cleaned up, a dangerous creek was fenced off, and several family resource centers were created. Para-professionals working in the program began to think of the process they were helping to shape as the empowerment process.

The connection between family support and community building at the neighborhood level that was forged through Family Matters also could be made from other starting points.

Neighborhood associations and their national umbrella associations could help form family empowerment associations. Local neighborhood associations could help seed FEAs by creating family empowerment committees whose members would be families, rather than individuals, and who would experiment with family empowerment activities. The family empowerment committees could study local obstacles to mounting such activities and could devise strategies for spinning-off FEAs. Or, they could continue the committees as part of the larger associations. National support organizations for neighborhood associations such as the National Association of Neighborhoods, the Center for Community Change, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation also could consider offering technical assistance to neighborhood associations that are attempting to form family empowerment associations.

The advantage of seeding FEAs within neighborhood associations is that such associations usually strive to operate on democratic principles (those that do not would not be desirable hosts); they are geographically based; and they usually stress empowerment rather than service delivery (McKnight, 1987). A possible disadvantage of seeding FEAs within neighborhood associations is that these associations often structure both individual and organizational memberships. The family perspective of an FEA might be diluted within a multiple-interest organization composed of different types of memberships.

Parent ACTION, the relatively new national advocacy organization for parents located in Baltimore, Md., might serve as an effective resource for family empowerment associations. Since FEAs would not stress parenthood only, they might help Parent ACTION overcome the privatism inherent in most parents' political perspectives. Currently, Parent ACTION attempts to turn this privatism to its own advantage by offering a growing package of individual benefits (discounts on hotels, books, health insurance; information on parenting skills and leadership; and other benefits) to attract and hold members. This approach has been adopted by many national interest groups, including the American Association of Retired Persons on which Parent ACTION models itself. This instrumental use of private benefits helps to build a large membership base, giving staff and board members more clout when lobbying in Washington. The cost is that it tends to encourage membership roles to be somewhat passive and reactive, encouraging members to defer to staff and board priorities on public policy issues. Supporting FEAs, either as formal chapters or as informal partners at the local level, might give Parent ACTION useful vehicles with which to build productive, publicly oriented roles for parents, their children, and other family members. Such local empowerment might help to build more membership involvement in the public policy activities of Parent ACTION.

Many other self-help groups, parent advocacy groups, block clubs, and informal voluntary associations now exist that could conceivably serve as hosts for fledgling family empowerment associations. However, to become FEAs, a great number of them would likely need to drastically revise their membership structures, goals, and decision making procedures. In many cases, it would be better for them to spin-off new and autonomous family empowerment associations.

Policies and Family Empowerment Associations: The Critical Position of States

All levels of government can be better mobilized to encourage family empowerment. As relative newcomers to the family policy arena, states may have the least explored potential powers.

Relative Advantages of Federal and State Initiatives

Historically, states have been passive partners with respect to community empowerment. For a short time, the federal community action programs attempted to encourage residents to organize their own organizations. The federal VISTA program has at times funded its volunteers to help people form cooperatives and community associations. Federal policies have stimulated tenants' associations to organize in public housing and in other areas as well. (See Edelman and Radin [1991] for historical perspective.)

But, in important respects states are better positioned than the federal government to help make family empowerment associations a reality. From a public policy standpoint, family empowerment is an institution-building challenge. Traditionally, it has been states, more than the federal government, that have defined how people in localities can form corporations. Whether business, nonprofit, or municipal, corporations derive their powers primarily from the states. Therefore, states possess unique powers to further family empowerment; they could help to bring about a set of corporations dedicated to that purpose.

States hold another advantage over the federal government with respect to family empowerment: they charter the formal corporations that must become more respectful of it. Seeing themselves as "institution builders" may not be commonplace for state officials. But, they already are. States can help legitimate and empower family empowerment associations directly, as will be proposed, but also indirectly by creating legal frameworks within which schools, hospitals, municipalities, and businesses must respect the integrity of family empowerment associations.

Critical Design Issues

As shown in Table 3, one of the critical variables to consider in designing policies that encourage the creation of family empowerment associations is the potential role of family members in those organizations. Two expectations would need to be structured into the roles for the policies to succeed in furthering the goals of family empowerment: (1) roles should emphasize productive rather than consumptive expectations, and (2) roles should emphasize community-oriented rather than privately directed activity.

Table 3

While most domestic policies in the United States now emphasize consumer orientations and narrow perspectives in the roles they design for citizens, some contemporary policies stress the creation of productive and publicly oriented roles (Berry et al., 1993; Ingram and Rathgeb Smith, 1993; Kordesh, 1989). The National Community Service and Trust Act will continue to expand productive roles through which students, college graduates, and elders will engage in a wide variety of community services. The VISTA program has structured organizing, community development, and direct service roles through which young adults engage in productive public activities. The growing array of intergenerational programs promoted by Generations Together at the University of Pittsburgh are often funded by federal and state governments. In many respects, public jobs programs use government policy as a tool to create productive, publicly oriented roles as well. However, in the latter case it is important to distinguish between publicly subsidized jobs in private businesses and public service jobs. Public service jobs meet both of the criteria that empowering associations would need to emphasize—productivity and a public orientation—while subsidized private sector jobs meet only the criterion of productivity.

Furthermore, other state and federal policies indirectly encourage productive and publicly oriented roles through the processes they require for developing plans and funding proposals. A recent example of a federal policy that will structure an integration of producer and consumer roles is the new grant program under Title XX of the Social Security Act. While most services funded under Title XX (through the Social Services Block Grant) have traditionally structured consumer and client roles, the new eligible activities place more stress on productive, public roles. For instance, funds can be used to support disadvantaged youths and adults in affordable housing construction and rehabilitation, public infrastructure improvements, and construction of community facilities. Another component provides funds to create roles in empowerment zones and enterprise communities that would provide skill development in community and economic development.

Empowerment Zones

The empowerment zone legislation promoted by the Clinton Administration and adopted by Congress engages the federal government in a new attempt to set up an enabling framework for community empowerment. It represents a significant attempt to use federal resources, state resources, and local initiative to create new, productive roles for individuals in economically distressed localities. It makes breakthroughs with respect to comprehensiveness and to encouraging state-local relationships conducive to empowerment.

But, will empowerment zones lead to family empowerment? They will do so to the extent that they mobilize families into the joint, productive activities similar to those envisioned for family empowerment associations. But, application guidelines as currently written will not directly encourage the formation of FEAs. For instance, there are positive references in the federal application materials to giving parents and youths productive economic roles and caregiving roles. Social service block grant funds can be used for youth employment, job training, community service, and family support activities (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and US Department of Agriculture, 1994). But, the vision stated in the application mainly emphasizes working through the current universe of economic development, social service, health, and environmental institutions, encouraging them to collaborate more effectively together. Improving collaboration is an admirable and important goal, but will not on its own reposition families so that family empowerment associations can emerge and become significant partners with those other institutions. More conscious and proactive strategies are needed so that families can wield power as significant players among institutions that will define the strategies for empowerment zones.

Admittedly, there are more obstacles in the political environment to creating productive, public roles through government action than there are to creating consumer and client roles through government action. Policies such as the Community Action Programs and VISTA have at times sparked controversy and political backlashes after mobilizing groups critical of government institutions. Labor unions and businesses have at times protested and blocked public jobs programs or subsidization of cooperatives when the roles they would have created overlapped with labor and business activities. One of the reasons for the slow expansion of youth apprenticeship programs has been resistance from turf conscious labor unions.

State Policies for Family Empowerment

States are now working on many fronts—economic development, education, health care—where leaders of formal organizations now attribute at least some of their problems to the deterioration of families. Partly as a response, states have been adopting reforms across many areas of policy that reflect a consistent set of principles. These principles of reform have been applied to such areas as welfare policy, children and family health care, child care, and school reorganization, and have been shown to be influential in the field of aging as well. Such policies will bring about a responsiveness and humanization of formal agencies and systems, but will be limited in several respects in their effects on the deteriorating trends in family life. First, they are not discriminating enough in addressing the issue of community decline. By focusing on system reform rather than building community, they tend to remain neutral to some of the underlying forces that cause family disempowerment. Second, they tend to be ambivalent about the critical religious and spiritual dimensions of family empowerment. Third, they overestimate the empowering potential of consumer roles.

The family empowerment agenda that states could begin formulating and experimenting with is one that could strengthen the reform agenda surveyed thus far. It also could strengthen state efforts in the more traditional arenas of education and economic development policy. A family empowerment agenda would be quite appropriate for state-level policy since its primary focus would be on the encouragement of local institution building. Chartering and enabling local institutions is one of the oldest powers held by states under American federalism. Municipalities, nonprofit corporations, and for-profit corporations all exist under state charters; they exist at the discretion of states. What states now need to do to help families is to use their traditional institution-building powers to help make localities more hospitable to families. They can do so by encouraging and giving legitimacy to a new layer of local institutions, referred to here as family empowerment associations. States could use indirect and direct methods to do so.

Direct Assistance. States could help form and strengthen family empowerment associations through direct grants. "Family empowerment grants" could go to eligible FEAs to support their productive and caregiving responsibilities. Such grants could be supported by new enabling legislation directly aimed at FEAs, or could be issued under legislation already supporting programs similar to those FEAs could engage in. Family empowerment associations could be added to the lists of eligible applicants for grants already made by states, such as Community Service Block Grant funds, demonstration funds supporting new citizen service projects, preventive health care projects (outreach to pregnant mothers and to families with children who heed immunizations), home-based care for the elderly, housing rehabilitation, and other projects. Family empowerment associations that receive state funds would have to demonstrate technical and fiscal competency as well as a minimal size and diversity in order to show that they are genuinely community-based.

In addition to making direct seed grants and grants to administer projects, states could help expand the technical assistance available to family empowerment associations. A cadre of organizational development specialists could be hired and trained by the state (or by a non-governmental contractor) and made available to family empowerment associations. Such "circuit riders" could have particular training in working with cooperatives and with small scale associations. They also could have technical expertise in areas in which FEAs might be most likely to initiate projects (gardening, neighborhood design, child care, elder care, and other areas). States could make grants to cooperative extension services to offer seminars and workshops to interested persons on how to start and operate family empowerment associations.

Indirect Assistance. In addition to directly supporting family empowerment associations, states could indirectly assist them by requiring formal organizations already heavily subsidized by the state to recognize them and collaborate with them. School districts could be required (or at least encouraged) to involve them in policymaking and program planning. Mental health agencies, public health clinics, child welfare agencies, community development agencies, and other state-supported systems also could be required to involve family empowerment associations as collaborators. Currently, many of these systems are already expanding their techniques for involving families in planning and service delivery, but such involvement usually is limited to bringing families onto committees nested within the structure of the agencies and systems themselves. Family involvement committees (such as in the CASSP programs) often become quite active as advocates for more services and for more parent involvement within the system. But, such advocacy generally emphasizes families in their consumer roles in relation to formal systems. Requiring formal service systems to collaborate with family empowerment associations would give families legitimacy and influence with those systems, making them into institutions with their own productive capacities.

States also would have the opportunity to encourage family empowerment associations by using rulings, guidelines, and incentives for municipalities, development districts, economic development agencies, and community development bodies to involve family empowerment associations as collaborators in long-range and strategic planning. Either through amendments to state municipal codes or through less coercive encouragement, states could press municipalities to give family empowerment issues higher priority in the development of comprehensive plans. Incentives (tax credits, waivers of regulations, special grants) could be given to municipalities that develop and use family empowerment criteria in zoning decisions and in approving new housing and commercial developments. The National League of Cities could be turned to for assistance in making city governments more responsive to family empowerment and support issues.

Cities and Family Empowerment Associations. Due in no small part to the Children and Families in Cities Project conducted by the National League of Cities, many municipalities are instituting some of these changes on their own. Because this monograph is the result of research into state practices, no attempt has been made to delve deeply into current and potential municipal practices with respect to family empowerment. Cities can and must make their various services, planning forums, and decision making bodies more family-friendly. Many have made important strides in doing so (National League of Cities, 1992). There is undoubtedly great potential in what municipalities can do to encourage the formation of family empowerment associations. If families themselves were better organized, cities would likely be induced to take even greater strides.

Starting at the Beginning. Proposals for state assistance to family empowerment associations presume the existence of such entities. Today, few such bodies that meet the suggested criteria for family empowerment associations are in place to receive state grants or technical resources. Yet, most of the resources—program designs, organizational models, funding possibilities, informal associations—that would need to be available are already in existence. Resources need to be reorganized into FEAs and both political authority and leadership ability must be used to give them spaces in localities to form and grow. Because they are composed of localities and because it has long been their business to empower people by enabling them to form corporations (governmental, nonprofit, and for-profit), states would seem to hold a special responsibility in relation to family empowerment. Perhaps it is time to give families protected space in the vast field of organizations that have gradually usurped their functions.

Establishing new grant programs would surely help the formation of family empowerment associations. One of the surest ways to induce institution building is to offer seed grants to new enterprises, corporations, and collaborations. But, states themselves need to examine how their families can be empowered to renew their productive and caregiving capacities in the economic, social political, and religio-cultural domains. In recent years, most states have formed commissions, interagency committees, special task forces, sub-cabinets, and other bodies to study conditions facing families especially those with children. By and large, those bodies have been focused on services needed by at-risk families rather than capacities that could be exercised by families if empowered to do so. Many of the task forces have been effective in helping states frame strategies for incorporating the family-centered and family support principles driving current system reforms.

The recent wave of state policy development focused on the reform of formal service systems and schools must now be followed by a wave of policy development focused on family empowerment. States must now focus task forces and commissions on family empowerment issues as well as family support issues, asking how families can be enabled to produce more of their own economic goods, more of their own child development and elder care, more of their own visions for city planning and neighborhood design, and more of their own practices for strengthening religious and cultural life. In other words, states must invite citizens and officials—as family members—to deliberate on how states can empower families to make localities into healthier communities. Widespread evidence is clear on this fact: no formal planning in economic development, no reform of education, no reform of professional human services will succeed if families are not somehow given more space, power, and resources to revitalize their capacities.

Conclusion: Repositioning Families into the Missing Middle

Introduction

Family empowerment associations would help reposition families within localities so that they could once again play significant roles in civic life. Family empowerment associations could serve as mediating institutions between families and formal service systems. Whether intended or not, public policies affect how different institutions fit within the larger ecology of institutions in localities. Since this effect is inevitable, policies might as well be crafted to empower families to help reverse their own decline by becoming significant actors in community building.

Family Empowerment Associations as Mediating Institutions

One aim of the goals recommended in this monograph is to reposition families in localities so that families can better mediate their own interests with formal organizations. This position toward empowerment and local institutions assumes a standpoint that differs somewhat from Berger and Neuhaus's influential argument about the importance of "mediating structures." In their essay, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (1977), they helped refocus the attention of policy analysts on small-scale structures and their significance as channels of influence between "megastructures" (the state and large corporations) and individuals. They defined mediating structures as "those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life" (Berger and Neuhaus, 1977, p. 2). However, while the Berger and Neuhaus analysis helped elevate interest in the relationship between public policies and small structures, it tended to treat small structures somewhat indiscriminately, lumping families into the same general category as churches, nonprofit organizations, and civic associations. As a result, it was not sufficiently attentive to the possibility that families themselves often need to have their interests mediated with other mediating structures. Indeed, many mediating structures, such as church congregations, small businesses (especially franchises), and nonprofit agencies, are often themselves extensions of larger, more powerful megastructures. For example, many nonprofit organizations are funded and regulated by the government to implement government programs. By working only within the current universe of existing mainline institutions, this analysis was not structured to look within the layer of mediating structures for the existence of a vacuum that families need to have filled.

A more recent analysis of families and local institutions that offers more meaningful distinctions between families and other local institutions is provided by Wynn et al. (1994); these researchers are affiliated with the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. Their focus on "primary" services bears some important commonalties with the notion of a family empowerment association proposed here. Focusing on families with children, Wynn et al. (1994, p. 7) define primary services as:

. . . activities, facilities, and events provided by organizations that are part of families' familiar social world. They are available for use voluntarily, most often without an elaborate process of certifying need or eligibility. Primary services offer opportunities for participation, avenues for contributing to the well-being of others, and sources of personal support. They provide access to community facilities, such as libraries, parks and museums, and to civic events and celebrations, often without formal registration. They enable children to form friendships and find support from both peers and adults, to investigate interests and develop and deepen skills, and to form ties to cultural, religious, and civic traditions. Primary services include activities for parents specifically—activities such as parent education, drop-in centers, parent support and self-help programs, and information and referral services—which are aimed at reinforcing parents' competence and enhancing their satisfaction in parenting and family life.

Littell and Wynn (1989) have found evidence that primary services are more lacking in poorer neighborhoods than they are in wealthier municipalities, thus making fewer developmental opportunities available for children and their parents. Primary services are seen as enhancing some of the capacities that must be exercised by families. Not all primary services would fit the description of family empowerment associations: most are not organized on the basis of family memberships and most do not exist to directly structure productive roles for families. Nevertheless, the depiction of primary services as an important institutional ring around families represents an important advance in thinking about "mediating institutions" and local empowerment.

Seen in this context, family empowerment associations could be classified as primary services aimed at mediating interests between families and other institutions. However, the explicit focus of FEAs on empowerment suggests another dimension in which they would differ from the primary services. As Wynn et al. put it (1994, p. 7), "We want to be clear that in calling organized activities communities 'primary services' we are not trying to change their nature or the nature of people's relationship with them; we are not interested in rigidifying them, or turning them into bureaucracies." Advocating a build-up of family empowerment associations as well as support for them through public policies does concern itself more with changing people's relationships with small-scale institutions, their communities, and power centers such as business and government. Power relations are inherent in any social relationship; the latter must change if the former are altered. Thus, giving families institutional bases from which to restore their own productive capacities as well as to make local institutions (whether small-scale mediating institutions or large bureaucracies) more respectful of families would bring about many changes in relationships. These changes would help unlock the potential for families to contribute to community building.

As organizations of families, they would give individual families more leverage against these other collective bodies than individual families could muster on their own. As incorporated bodies, the family empowerment associations would be eligible for grants as well as contributions from members and others. They could serve as alternative producers of goods when families were not satisfied with the production methods for goods from mainline providers (e.g., religious base communities formed by Catholic laity to give women opportunities to lead worship). And, in contrast to other institutions in which family involvement issues are often continuing sources of conflict, family involvement would be normal practice in family empowerment associations.

Objections

Several objections could be raised to the proposition that public policies should be utilized to create family empowerment associations. The possible retorts will reflect the number of these objections that rest on assumptions about the private vs. public roles of families.

Aren't families busy enough without being expected to form and manage family empowerment associations? One of the reasons families are already under such stress is that many parents barely have enough time to spend with children, for family meals and for parental involvement in their children's school activities. One could certainly argue that organizing them into these new, more involving associations would only further detract from the limited time spent together by family members.

While this objection applies well to most institutions in which families normally participate, the purpose of family empowerment associations would be to create associations in which families join and participate as families. The normal "zero-sum situation," in which a parent has to choose between the community organization meeting or spending time with the children, would not occur. The whole purpose of a family empowerment association would be to merge some private and some public activities so that families could do both simultaneously. Thus, activities must be structured to be appropriate for all ages, with parents continuing to parent their children even as they also join with other families in tending gardens, holding religious ceremonies, tutoring, or even fixing up housing. In fact, with the changes taking place in the economy, more parents will be working flexible hours, working from home, and working part-time. In some respects, more time will be available for their involvement in the joint, productive tasks made possible by family empowerment associations.

Families have very narrow perspectives on public issues: wouldn't family empowerment associations only further fragment public discussion? Those who have attended school board meetings or local government hearings can point to the reactive and obstructionist participation that often seems to result when parents attend meetings as parents. Would it not be unwise to invite more of this highly personalized activity into local politics?

Yes, it would be unwise, but family empowerment associations would not do that. The types of parent participation in politics described earlier are divisive and narrowly focused because of their emphasis on the inherently personal and narrow perspectives of parents as consumers, not as producers or community builders. Family empowerment associations would not be primarily lobbying organizations; they would be producing organizations. When they did choose to advocate positions in public (whether at zoning hearings, shareholders meetings, or congregational meetings), they would be representing the broader and more proactive stances of people who work together, make things together, and value community. Family empowerment associations would help broaden the perspectives of families as they participate in public life. They would help to counterbalance the admittedly narrow and selfish positions parents now often advocate in public forums.

Don't most families lack the skills and experience necessary to deal with funding sources and to handle organizational tasks such as budgeting, accounting, and filing tax returns? According to one school of thought, creating family empowerment associations would invite many unskilled persons to take on management and accounting tasks, ultimately causing problems with accountability and improper use of funds. After all, running an incorporated association requires good record-keeping, regular report filing, and other routine tasks. Who would be responsible?

Training would need to be made available to leaders of family empowerment associations. This training would not differ greatly from that already offered by many organizations to voluntary associations. From the legal or fiscal standpoint, family empowerment associations would be rather typical voluntary organizations. FEAs with large enough budgets could hire their own staff to handle such matters.

But, aren't families supposed to be private institutions? After all, the intimacy and privacy of family life is often valued most highly by people. The smallness and closeness of family life is important for fostering parent-child bonds. Many issues are best resolved just between family members.

Family empowerment associations would not replace the private family. They would help restore the public family by making private family life and public community life more continuous— "seamless," to use a currently popular term. This seamlessness was more characteristic of pre-industrial families. Building family empowerment associations would help restore some of the benefits of that earlier integratedness without resurrecting the patriarchy. Indeed, using voluntary associations to rebuild family-community ties would retain the voluntariness associated with private activity while encouraging the community-oriented perspectives necessary for public activity.

Families Helping to Restore the Missing Middle

By giving families new vehicles for productive, community oriented ventures, family empowerment associations would help make families significant participants in the restoration of the "missing middle," the important layer of civil society that helps make localities into communities. Public policies could help families do this. As Kemmis laments (1990, p. 68):

This "missing middle" which our public policy seems never to find is in fact the res, the "public" thing of the "republic"—the vanishing table which could "gather us together and yet prevent us from falling over each other." It is that higher common ground which we share, yet cannot find and cannot occupy.

It is difficult for citizens to formulate policies from some common standpoint or common ground. This may be due to the fact that the creation of institutions that help people find and occupy the missing middle has not been a matter of public policy.

Many persons yearn for a restoration of a strong civic community. This yearning is reflected in the growing communitarian movement, as well as in many other spheres. Yet, there is also a powerful yearning for stronger family life, reflected in the movement toward more family-centered policies. Without new institutions to make family life and community life more continuous, however these two impulses will pull people in opposite directions. The assumption—family = private, community = public—will help to drive the family movement and the community building movement in opposite directions unless it is cracked, both conceptually and practically.

It is important but not sufficient to recognize that strengthening public life through an invigorated citizenry will spin back benefits to private life. Lappe and Dubois make this connection quite convincingly in their recent, provocative book,The Quickening of America (1994). They describe myths that keep Americans from creating a more vital, participatory public culture. One of the identified myths is very germane to the relationship between family and community: "Sometimes we enter public life to protect our private lives. Most of the time public life simply interferes with a healthy private life" (Lappe and Dubois, 1994, p. 33). Directly applying this myth to families, Lappe and Dubois ( 1994, ibid.) believe that:

Public life—our job, our community involvement, our educational activity—is often seen as threatening to our family ties. Sometimes public commitments divert our attention and capture our time. And some of the indirect pluses for our family and friends are hard to see. But, if public life develops essential aspects of our character and teaches us important skills, there's enormous potential for public life to enhance our private relationships.

Yet, while it is important to recognize the private benefits to be derived by families with publicly active members, this recognition still does not address the problem inherent in the assumption that family life is private life only. As long as the assumption itself is embraced, there will continue to be an insoluble conflict between the impulse to restore the "public thing" and the impulse to strengthen the family.

The public roles of families must be defined, affirmed, and institutionalized to overcome the debilitating effects that working from this assumption has on community building. Another recent work that advocates a greater public role for families, especially for fathers, is Richard Louv's Fatherlove (1993). Louv argues that while the breadwinning and nurturing of children are critical aspects of fatherhood, another dimension needs to be expanded—that of "community building." As community builders, fathers fight for changes in workplaces and improvements in neighborhoods in order to enhance the conditions in which all children grow up. According to Louv (1993, pp. 138-139):

We are the protectors of the nest. At the very least, we are full partners with women in protecting our nests. We can protect our nests best by becoming passionately involved in building a stronger community around our nests, taking our children with us into the community and teaching them by our example that no one parents alone.

Seeing the potential community building dimensions of fatherhood helps to bypass the assumption that the family is a private endeavor only. But one problem still remains: how can changes be made in the institutional makeup of communities so that the community building roles of fathers (and mothers and children) can become a more common practice?

The family empowerment association could help bring about this institutional change. Public policies could be designed to help empower families to improve both their private and public roles. After many decades of policies that have built up institutions only to disempower families, it is time to enact policies that empower families so that they can form together, improve their own lives, and participate with schools, agencies, and churches to revitalize their communities. That is, after all, the essence of family empowerment: giving families the capacity to change themselves and the world around them.

Endnote

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Appendix

List of Pennsylvania Family Policy Seminars, Panelists, and Briefing Papers

Seminar 1

October 31, 1991
"Child Care and Development Block Grant: How Will It Affect the Quality of Programs?"

Panelists
Susan Golonka
State Seminars Coordinator, Family Impact Seminars, Washington, DC
"A Family Perspective on Child Care Policy"

Carolyn Edwards
Professor, Department of Family Studies, University of Kentucky
"Child Care Quality and Social Context"

Richard Kordesh
Research Associate, Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation,
The Pennsylvania State University
"State Child Care Policies from a National Perspective"

Robert McCall
Director, Office of Child Development, University of Pittsburgh
"Child Care Quality in Pennsylvania: Experiences and Possibilities"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S., S. Harkness, D. Blowman, and K. Hannan (1991). The Child Care and Development Block Grant: How Will It Affect the Quality of Programs? University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 2

December 5, 1991
"Creating and Sustaining Integrated Early Health Care"

Panelists

Susan Aronson
Director, Project ECELS
"Integrating Child Care and Health Care: The ECELS Project"

Ronald David
Lecturer in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government
"Nurturing Healing Relationships Through Health Policy"

Robert Haigh
Office of Policy Evaluation and Development, Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare
"Public-Private Partnerships in Financing Integrated Early Health Care"

Karen Troccoli
StaffAssociate, National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality
"Best Practice Approaches to Integrated Early Health Care: A National View"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S., S. Harkness, D. Blowman, K. Hannan, and S. Hood (1991). Creating and Sustaining Integrated Early Health Care. University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 3

March 19, 1992
"The Future of Schools as Family Centers"

Panelists

Bryan Samuels
Director of Research, Family Resource Coalition, Chicago, IL
"Family Resource Centers in Schools: How Do We Know When They Work?"

Peggy Schooling
Teacher and Early Intervention Specialist, School District of Lancaster, Lancaster, PA
"A Teacher's Perspective on School-based Family Centers"

Mildred Winter
Executive Director, Parents as Teachers National Center, University of Missouri at St. Louis
"In Every District: The State of Missouri's Approach to Parent Education and Family Support Services"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S., S. Hood, and N. Krause (1992). The Future of Schools as Family Centers. University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 4

April 30, 1992:
"Enhancing Development in Early Adolescence Through Creative Family-School-Community Partnerships"

(Offered jointly with Penn State's PRIDE Project)

Panelists

Lawrence Steinberg
Professor, Department of Psychology, Temple University
"Why Early Adolescence?"

George Harri
Executive Director, New Futures Program, Pittsburgh, PA
"New Futures Program: Lessons from Four Cities"

Roberta Knowlton
Executive Director, New Jersey School-Based Youth Services Program
"New Jersey's School-Based Youth Services Program: What Works? What Doesn't Work?"

Briefing Paper
Crouter, A. C., B. Mandel, R. S. Kordesh, B. Manke, and W. Peters ( 1992). Enhancing Development in Early Adolescence Through Creative Family-School-Community Partnerships. University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

[Seminar 5 was a two-part seminar, "Families and Health Insurance Expansion: Where to Begin, Where to End?"]

Seminar 5, Part I

November 12, 1992:
"Expanding Children's Health Insurance:
State Experiences with Implementation"

Panelists

Kala Ladenheim
Senior Research Associate, Intergovernment Health Policy Project, George Washington University
"State Trends in the Broadening of Health Insurance for Children: Implementation Concerns"

Cathy Lamp
Assistant Division Director, Health Care Management, Minnesota Department of Human Services
"The Children's Health Plan in Minnesota"

Rose Naff
Executive Director, Florida Healthy Kids Corporation
"The Creation and Implementation of the Healthy Kids Corporation"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S., S. Harkness, K. Hannan, and S. Hood (1992). Families and Health Insurance Expansion: Where to Begin, Where to End ? University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 5, Part II

November 19, 1992:
"State Policies on Long-Term Care Insurance: How Will Families Be Supported?"

Panelists

Jeffery Merrill
Professor, Columbia University School of Public Health
"State Issues in the Financing of Long-term Care"

Evelyn Oliver Knight
Communications Of ficer, Connecticut Department of Aging
"Connecticut's Long-Term Care Partnership"

James Firman
President and Chief Executive Of ficer, United Senior Health Cooperative, Washington, DC
"Emerging National Standards for Long-term Care Insurance"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S., S. Harkness, K. Hannan, and S. Hood (1992).Families and Health Insurance Expansion: Where to Begin, Where to End? University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

[Seminar 6 was a two-part seminar, "Employment-based Strategies for Relieving Family Poverty"]

Seminar 6, Part I

April 22, 1993:
"Facilitating the Welfare-to-Work Transition"

Panelists

Barbara Goldman
Senior Vice President, Manpower Development Research Corporation
"What Have Been the Effects of State Welfare-to-Work Policies?"

Bette Crumrine
Program Manager, Iowa Department of Human Rights
"Iowa's Family Development and Self Sufficiency Project"

Marva Hammons
Executive Director, Denver Family Opportunity Program
"Community and Family-based Services for JOBS Program Participants"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S. and S. Hood (1993). Employment-based Strategies for Relieving Family Poverty. University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 6, Part II

April 29, 1993:
"Youth Apprenticeships and the School-to-Work Transition"

Panelists

Jean Adair
Program Manager, Jobs for the Future, Somerville, MA
"Overview of States' Trends Toward Development of Youth Apprenticeships"

Ellen Seusy
Senior Program Analyst, Ohio Department of Human Services
"Keeping At-Risk Teens in School: Ohio's LEAP Initiative"

Lile Martens
Acting State Superintendent, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
"Wisconsin's Statewide Approach to Strengthening School-Work Connections"

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S. and S. Hood (1993). Employment-based Strategies for Relieving Family Poverty. University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

Seminar 7

November 18, 1993:
"The Family Support Movement: Is It
Time to Adopt an Intergenerational Approach?"

Panelists

Sally Newman
Executive Director, Generations Together, University of Pittsburgh

John Boner
Executive Director, Near Eastside Multi-Service Center, Indianapolis, IN

Ann Adalist-Estrin
Executive Director, Parent Resource Association, Wincote, PA; board member, Family Resource Coalition, Chicago, II.

Briefing Paper
Kordesh, R. S. and M. Wheeland (1993). The Family Support Movement: Is it Time to Adopt an Intergenerational Approach? University Park, PA: Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University.

The following briefing papers were jointly prepared by personnel in the PRIDE Project and the Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University. Funding for this phase of the project was provided by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

McGroder, S. M., A. C. Crouter, and R. S. Kordesh (1994). School-based Collaborations to Promote Child and Adolescent Health and Well-being. University Park, PA: PRIDE Project and the Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University (February 24, Wilkes-Barre; March 24, State College).

McGroder, S. M., A. C. Crouter, and R. S. Kordesh (1994). Schools and Communities: Emerging Collaborations for Serving Adolescents and Their Families. University Park, PA: PRIDE Project and the Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration, The Pennsylvania State University (March 31, Harrisburg).

The Pennsylvania Family Policy Seminar Series was the first state-level seminar series modeled on the ongoing national seminars offered by Family Impact Seminars (FIS), Washington, D.C. FIS offered invaluable technical assistance to the Pennsylvania Family Policy Seminars. FIS has helped mount additional seminar projects in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, and other states.

Index

Preface
Overview: What Does Family Empowerment Mean?
I. The New Family Policy Agenda: More Supportive Than Empowering
II. To Empower Families
III. Family Empowerment and Community Building
IV. Family Empowerment Associations
V. Where to Begin?
Conclusion: Repositioning Families into the Missing Middle
References
Appendix

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