Hi everyone,

I hope that you are all well. I haven't met many of you, but I look forward to getting to know this community better. Most of my work with communities will be through my consulting company, Promethean Community. However, today, I'm writing to you from a different vantage point. In addition to my consulting company, I'm the Parent Education Manager at a small non-profit. It is from this location that I write to you today.

I write to you because I wanted to ask this community ways in which you thought this small non-profit that does parent education could integrate ABCD tool kit as a way to do a strength-based community assessment?

My basic idea was to have one or two one time workshops for parents, and then spend the latter half of each workshop using tools from the ABCD tool kit as a way to guide future workshops that parents could provide with each other, or other community members could provide for each other. Actually, you are already helping me by making me think of using the "We can" game (http://www.abcdinstitute.org/docs/WE%20CAN%20Guidelines%20Oct%2010.pdf) for parents to identify people in their local community, including themselves, who could do these one type workshops.

What are some other ideas that you may have as to how to infuse the ABCD tool kit into this hybrid workshops of parenting education classes/strength based community assessments?

Warmly,

Andres

Andres Marquez-Lara

Founder and President

Promethean Community

updated by @andres-marquez-lara: 10/24/16 04:45:35PM

Hi Andres -

One of the first things that comes to mind for me is to talk with parents individually and in groups about what they would like to do to help increase parent education (BTW, what exactly what does that phrase mean? Educate them about what?). There's a great videowith some questions that may be helpful for these discussions.

Thanks for your reply, Deb! I really appreciate it. The video is particularly helpful as part of the work will be to work with parents to do outreach to invite other parents to the groups. As for what do I mean by "parent education", I mean using evidence-based curriculum to support positive parenting performances (i.e. Tips on how to communicate with your child "I messages vs. You messages", anger management, etc). Basically, I'm trying to enhance a traditional parent education curriculum and program, with asset based mapping.

Thanks again for the help.

Warmly,

Andres

Hello Andres and Deb,

I also enjoyed the video Deb, thank you for sharing that.

I am a volunteer working board member the Community Assets for Education (Cafe) Institute in Calgary, AB. Our work is to support families, schools and communities to come together in education. We provide parent leaders, community and school educators with training and resources to integrate an ABCD - capacity building approach to support learning. We have provided on-line some resources for hosting our Parent Cafe conversation cafe topics with parents in support of learning, as well as other research and resources for our asset-based leadership in education (ABLE) work. One of the things we always ask parents is to identify the fun things they do at home with their child and then we have them match these to the different curriculum areas to reinforce their own strengths, validate what they are already doing, and connect learning at home and school. We always include aspects of asset mapping, individual strengths, multiple intelligences inventories and others. Many of our resources can be found on line at:http://www.cafeinstitute.org.Please check it out and feel free to use and contact us with any inquiries.

Jill Koch

Community Assets for Education (Cafe) Institute

702 Rideau Road SW

Calgary, AB

T2S 0R6

jkoch@cafeinstitute.org

One of the things we always ask parents is to identify the fun things they do at home with their child and then we have them match these to the different curriculum areas to reinforce their own strengths, validate what they are already doing, and connect learning at home and school.

I love that idea, Jill. So simple & elegant & fun! And thanks for sharing the great resources.

Thanks, Jill! I really appreciate the comments and suggestions. I'll make sure to look at your website for more resources. Warmly, Andres