By Executive Director Claire Louge
If you and I have had a conversation within the last couple of years, you’ve probably heard me talk about FRCs.
Family Resource Centers (FRCs) are welcoming community hubs where families can access formal and informal supports, both in times of need and as a part of regular day-to-day life.
Why is PCAAZ so focused on them now? Because in recent years, as we’ve continued to learn about what our state needs from families and from our partners, all signs are pointing to FRCs.
During my first year as Executive Director of PCAAZ, I got the chance to hold focused discussions with over a dozen community groups across the state. In these discussions, I asked participants to share every day examples of actions people can take to strengthen families in their community.
Those discussions yielded so many rich stories and tips, which both shaped my philosophy as leader and guided the direction of our organization. Within them there was a common theme: it’s hard to be a parent, and all parents need support sometimes. When they don’t get that support, it’s children that lose the most, because an overwhelmed caregiver cannot be a present caregiver- at least not for long. If we care about children, we need to support their parents. When we prevent overwhelm, we prevent child adversity. Supporting families IS child abuse and neglect prevention.
We sought opportunities to share that message. The next year, we partnered with DCS to design a training that would help educators – a big group of mandated reporters - connect families to support. To develop that training, we held focus groups of educators to help us understand their perception of their role in supporting families.
Those discussions uncovered a major misperception: many educators thought that the way to get families support was by calling DCS. After all, calling DCS was the only thing many of them had been taught to do when they were concerned about a child and their family. Many didn’t realize that they could have any other role in supporting families. We ended up calling that training “Considering Yourself a Mandated Supporter.”
The training outlines why supporting families protects children, and how to connect and engage with families to offer them resources. Though it’s a good training with a valuable idea, developing it yielded a big realization and frustration for me: it’s not easy, simple, or straightforward to find support for families. At the end of the training, we share a disjointed list of varying hotlines, warm lines, and websites to help people start finding what’s available to help families.
In other words, calling DCS is one number to call, but finding support for families is an overwhelming, frustrating, time-consuming hunt.
All this led me to understand that we need one, connected family support system in Arizona. Since all families need support sometimes, we need to make it easy –and safe- for families to find support in their local communities.
That’s when I started learning more about FRCs: places where people can get support for the critically important job of parenting. Welcoming, non-judgmental hubs that can connect them to resources and people in their community, even if they don’t know what they need yet. Families and the people who want to support them need one place to start. FRCs are that place.
We have FRCs in Arizona - staffed by passionate, extraordinary, caring people - but they don’t yet exist in every county. We need to establish them in the rural counties that lack them and support the wonderful ones we have to continue and expand, so that all families in Arizona have a place to build their resilience, community, parenting skills, and get connected to what they need to be stable and thrive.
And then we need to make sure everyone knows about them. Because great things may be available, but that doesn’t matter if people don’t know where they are or how to access them. FRCs have been called a best-kept secret. We’re committed to getting that secret out.
In the coming months, we’ll be hosting virtual sessions on the movement to uplift FRCs, and the role we can all play in building an ecosystem of family support in Arizona. I hope you join us.