By Bob Sege, 7/22/21, positiveexperience.org/blog
Summertime offers a chance to pause and reflect. This past year our team has had the good fortune to meet with, teach, and learn from dozens of organizational leaders and well over 10,000 participants from around the country and beyond. HOPE resonates with the values and work of so many other programs, organizations, and frameworks. At the same time, HOPE coalesces many years of research, thinking, and practical experience. What does HOPE add? Why are so many people and organizations interested? Why now? Here are a few of our thoughts; please let us know what you think! Share your thoughts on our contact form (Link here).
HOPE centers the experiences of the child. This approach adds to the family focus of the Strengthening Families Protective Factors approach, and the policy and norms perspective of the CDC’s Essentials for Childhood program. These two approaches, both grounded in the prevention of child maltreatment, have been widely adopted - Strengthening Families in the child welfare system, and Essentials in state government.
The four building blocks of HOPE, which were drawn from a review of studies of effective interventions, weave together other important concepts:
- HOPE includes new work on early relational health, and provides a context, built on epidemiology and brain science, to underscore the key role of safe, stable, nurturing relationships in child development.
- HOPE pulls together many aspects of a child’s environment. Safe, stable, and equitable environments to live, learn and play include the social determinants of health. Children need food, shelter, and other concrete supports. They also need emotional safety found in positive school environments, spiritual communities, and access to nature, and homes where they feel safe and valued.
Photo by La-Rel Easter on Unsplash
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