National Fatherhood Initiative’s New Evidence-Based Program Offerings to Serve At-Risk Teen and Young Adult Fathers and Couples
Germantown, MD (PRWEB) July 24, 2014 -- National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), the nation’s leading provider of fatherhood skill-building materials and training, has formed an innovative partnership with The Dibble Institute to offer two programs that will be implemented by community-based organizations across the nation, Relationships Smarts PLUS and Love Notes. The programs help at-risk teens and young adults who are and are not parents learn how to create healthy relationships—and ultimately—healthy families.
Organizations will use Relationships Smarts PLUS to teach teens and young adults how to make wise decisions about relationships, sex, dating, and pregnancy prevention, thus laying the foundation for them to be effective parents when the time is right, and not before. For teens and young adults who are parents, organizations will use Love Notes to help this population with one of its greatest challenges to effective parenting—lack of relationship skills between parents—and to make wise choices (e.g. planned pregnancies) that are also critical challenges they face and essential to building a strong family now and for the future.
Relationships Smarts PLUS is listed on The National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP), and Loves Notes (an adaptation of Relationships Smarts PLUS) is currently part of a rigorous evaluation as a pregnancy prevention strategy for at-risk youth, funded by a Tier II grant from the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families. Love Notes has also been shown to be effective as part of a rigorous evaluation in which males comprised nearly 70 percent of both intervention and control groups.
NFI president Christopher A. Brown says, “These two new offerings from NFI will help organizations that work with teens and young adults—whether parents or future parents, dads or moms—equip young people with the skills and knowledge they need to develop healthy relationships now and in the future and, ultimately, to be the parents their children need or will need them to be.”
About this innovative partnership, Brown says, “We know that there has been a lack of quality programs for teen and young adult dads because our customers have asked for such programs for many years. We could have created our own programs, but after conducting research into the salient issues facing this population—and whether such programs already exist that have been shown through evaluations to be effective with males—we discovered the two Dibble programs which center on healthy relationships. And with that being perhaps the most salient of the issues, it was a no-brainer to make these two programs a part of our offerings. They allow organizations to work with teen and young adult dads separately or couples together, and NFI to continue expansion of our resources for moms focused on improving the relationships between dads and moms for the sake of children.”
For 20 years, NFI has worked to end father absence by creating healthy families across the nation. These two new offerings are one of the many ways NFI continues working to help organizations and communities better serve young families through involved, responsible, and committed fathers.
As the premier fatherhood renewal organization in the country, NFI, founded in 1994, works in every sector and at every level of society to “create a world where every child has a 24/7 Dad®.” NFI is the #1 provider of fatherhood resources in the nation. Since 2004, through FatherSOURCE™, its national resource center, NFI has distributed over 6.7 million resources, and has trained over 13,700 practitioners from over 6,300 organizations on how to deliver programs to dads. NFI is also the most quoted authority on fatherhood in America. Since 2009, NFI has been mentioned in nearly 4,000 news stories, and makes regular appearances in national media to discuss the importance of involved, responsible, and committed fatherhood.
Learn more at http://www.fatherhood.org/rel-smarts and http://www.fatherhood.org/love-notes
Ryan Sanders, National Fatherhood Initiative, http://www.fatherhood.org, +1 (240) 912-1289, [email protected]
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