By The HOPE Team, 2/23/23, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/
February is Parent Leadership Month, bringing attention to the importance of parent voices, and parent leadership in the child and family serving sectors. When parents lead and advocate, children and families get better access to the services and supports they need. Encouraging parents to use advocacy tools supports their roles as experts of their children, families, and communities, and supports their skills and confidence to advocate for their needs in many settings, including organizational and policy decision-making. Integrating parents at all levels is important to the HOPE framework because it intentionally focuses programs and services on the direct needs of the specific families accessing services.
There are many ways to add parent and family voices when implementing the HOPE framework. Last year, the HOPE National Resource Center (NRC) started the FACEs of HOPE (Family and Community Experts) Advisory Council. FACEs of HOPE advises the NRC on various projects to ensure that parent and family voice is incorporated in the work that we do. FACEs of HOPE also promotes diversity in decision-making at the HOPE NRC. So far, our work with FACEs has included: developing our anti-racism goals, creating a family survey for our HOPE Innovation Network, co-training with HOPE staff at the Annual HOPE Summit, and guest writing blog articles. This year, we are beginning to add FACEs of HOPE members to research projects to support our role in Community-Engaged Medicine.
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