Programs

Family Spirit® is a culturally tailored home-visiting program designed to promote optimal health and well-being for parents and their children. Family Spirit combines the use of paraprofessionals from the community as home visitors and a culturally informed, strengths-based curriculum as a core strategy to support young families. Parents are given information and taught skills designed to promote healthy development and positive lifestyles for themselves and their children. Family Spirit consists of 63 lessons taught from pregnancy to age 3.

Family Spirit's vision: To break intergenerational cycles of despair in historically disenfranchised communities by empowering a local workforce as change agents for promoting the best start for young families.

Family Spirit's mission: Family Spirit envisions a future where every community, regardless of socioeconomic status, will have access to an evidence-based, culturally competent early childhood home-visiting model that employs local paraprofessionals to promote optimal health and well-being for parents and young children in their communities.

The Botvin LifeSkills Training Middle School Program is a substance abuse and violence prevention program for youth in grades 6-9. LifeSkills Training is comprehensive and developmentally designed to promote positive youth development. In addition to helping kids resist drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, the LifeSkills Training Middle School program is also designed to support the reduction of violence and other high-risk behaviors. Each session is 30-45 minutes; sessions can be taught either on an intensive schedule (two to three times a week) until the program is complete, or on a more extended schedule (once a week).

Program Learning Objectives:

• Personal Self-Management Skills – Students develop skills that help them enhance self-esteem, develop problem-solving abilities, reduce stress and anxiety, and manage anger.
• General Social Skills – Students gain skills to meet personal challenges such as overcoming shyness, communicating clearly, building relationships, and avoiding violence.
• Drug Resistance Skills – Students build effective defenses against pressures to use tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs.

Public child welfare agency workers use Team Decision Making® (TDM™) meetings with the aim of making the best possible decision regarding out-of-home care, and to engage partners, such as community members and the extended family, in planning. The worker convenes the group whenever their assessment of safety suggests the need to consider out-of-home care, whether or not with court involvement. Initial TDM™ meetings are held prior to the child leaving home or, in an emergency, prior to the initial court hearing or within its legally required timeframe.

The goal is to reach consensus about a decision regarding out-of-home care that protects the child(ren) while preserving family integrity. The initial TDM™ seeks to intervene early in a case to prevent a removal or to ensure children are placed with family whenever possible. If out-of-home care is necessary, TDM™ sets the stage for collaboration among biological parents, foster, or kinship caregivers, and for moving the entire team toward safe reunification.

Triple P - Positive Parenting Program® - Level 3 Primary Care (Level 3 Triple P Primary Care) is one of the interventions within the Triple P - Positive Parenting Program® System (System Triple P) which is designed to help parents learn strategies to promote social competence and self-regulation in children as well as decrease problem behavior. Level 3 Triple P Primary Care is typically delivered as 1-4 brief, individual sessions with parents. Parents set personal goals, develop their own parenting plans, and learn to use positive parenting strategies to encourage children to learn the skills and competencies they need. Level 3 Triple P Primary Care is designed as brief, early intervention strategies to be offered by those in a community in regular contact with families of children and may include such settings as health care clinics, schools or early childhood education programs, childcare facilities, community libraries, and/or by other providers in various family-serving community agencies. One of the other Level 3 Triple P interventions, Triple P - Positive Parenting Program® - Level 3 Discussion Group, has been rated a 2 – Supported by Research Evidence on the CEBC Scientific Rating Scale and Triple P - Positive Parenting Program® - Level 4 (Level 4 Triple P) has been rated a 1 – Well-Supported by Research Evidence on the same scale.

Selected Seminars Triple P is one of the interventions within the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program® System (System Triple P) which is designed to help parents learn strategies to promote social competence and self-regulation in children as well as decrease problem behavior. It involves a series of positive parenting presentations designed to reach a large group of parents (20 to 200). The seminars address common parenting problems and provide parents with suggestions to try at home. Parents are taught how to use positive parenting to encourage children to learn the skills and competencies they need to promote their health, development, and well-being. There are three seminar topics, with each taking around 60 minutes to present, plus 30 minutes for question time. In Seminar 1 – The Power of Positive Parenting – practitioners introduce parents to five key principles of positive parenting. In Seminar 2 – Raising Confident, Competent Children – parents are introduced to six core building blocks that are designed to help children to become confident and successful at school and beyond. Seminar 3 – Raising Resilient Children – introduces six additional core building blocks for parents to use when helping their children to manage their feelings and coping skills. Other Triple P interventions have been rated on the CEBC. Triple P – Positive Parenting Program® – Level 4 (Level 4 Triple P) has been rated a 1 – Well-Supported by Research Evidence CEBC on the CEBC Scientific Rating Scale. Triple P – Positive Parenting Program® – Level 3 Discussion Group, has been rated a 2 – Supported by Research Evidence on the same scale. Triple P – Positive Parenting Program® – Level 3 Primary Care (Level 3 Triple P Primary) has also been rated.

ABFT is an attachment-based, trauma-informed, emotion-focused intervention for youth with suicide, depression anxiety, and/or trauma. Treatment strengthens secure parent-child relationships which can reduce family conflict and buffer against stress. The model is structured yet flexible, requiring therapists to be focused as well as emotionally attuned. Treatment is constructed around five tasks:

• The Relational Reframe task helps families focus on relationship repair as the initial goal of therapy.
• The Adolescent Alliance task helps link current distress to attachment ruptures and prepares the adolescent to talk about this with caregivers.
• The Parent Alliance task focuses on reducing caregiver distress, increasing empathy, and improving parenting skills.
• The Attachment Task brings the family members back together to discuss these attachment ruptures. This helps families resolve problems and practice new interpersonal and affect regulation skills.
• As trust reemerges, therapy focuses on Promoting Autonomy task, wherein caregivers help promote adolescent autonomy and competency outside the home.

ABFT is generally delivered in weekly sessions for 12-16 weeks.

A Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network club is a student-run organization that unite lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning plus (LGBTQ+) youth and allied youth to build community and organize around issues impacting them in their schools and communities. GSA clubs have evolved beyond their traditional role to serve as safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in middle schools and high schools. They have emerged as vehicles for deep social change related to racial, gender, and educational justice.

The Family Acceptance Project® (FAP) Family Support Model is a family-oriented model of wellness, prevention, and care for LGBT children and adolescents that is designed to help ethnically and religiously diverse families decrease rejection and increase support to prevent risk and promote their LGBT children’s well-being. Other goals of the program are to help families maintain children who are LGBTQ in their homes, sustain connections, reconnect families, and promote permanency. This family intervention model works across systems to support young people who are LGBTQ in the context of their families, cultures, and faith communities, with a focus on upstream prevention.

RISE (Recognize, Intervene, Support, Empower) is a dual-intervention program consisting of direct services for children/youth and their caregivers, and capacity building support for providers. With RISE, staff in organizations and systems of care are taught how to:

• Recognize that they have LGBTQ+ youth in their care
• Intervene during instances of bias, harassment, and discrimination
• Support LGBTQ+ youth in their care
• Empower their organization and staff to create affirming environments and provide appropriate care for LGBTQ+ youth

Each of these actions is designed to increase the likelihood that LGBTQ+ youth will achieve permanency. At the core of RISE is the belief that with skilled, thoughtful, and targeted interventions, LGBTQ+ youth can achieve permanency and positive outcomes in safe and loving homes.

Project ALERT is a classroom-based substance abuse prevention program for 7th and 8th graders designed to reduce the experimental and continued use of drugs. Through a series of comprehensive lessons, Project ALERT is aimed at motivating students against drug use, cultivating new nonuse attitudes and beliefs, and equipping teens with the skills and strategies they’ll use to resist drugs.

The goals of Project ALERT are to:

• Motivate students against drug use
• Provide skills and strategies to resist drugs
• Establish new nonuse attitudes and beliefs

The Project ALERT two-year core curriculum consists of 11 weekly lessons to be taught the first year, plus three booster lessons that should be delivered the following year. Project ALERT complements other curricula and can be implemented in conjunction with lessons from sex education, health, physical education, science, and social studies.

Trevor Ally Trainings and Trevor CARE Trainings are designed for adults. CARE Trainings and Ally Trainings are available in-person for your staff, company, or member organization, or online for groups and individuals.

Trevor Ally Training provides a basic framework of understanding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning (LGBTQ) youth and the unique challenges they often face. This training is designed to create dialogue regarding what it means to be an adult ally for LGBTQ youth by informing participants about terminology used in the LGBTQ community, the process of “coming out” as an LGBTQ person and a discussion of the challenges faced by LGBT youth in their homes, schools, and communities. Through activities, participants are encouraged to explore their own biases, build their knowledge and understanding, and develop empathy. In addition to providing this framework, the Trevor Ally Training offers specific action items to improve the environment for LGBTQ youth.

The Trevor Project’s CARE Training is an interactive and intensive training that provides adults with an overview of suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, & questioning (LGBTQ) youth and the different environmental stressors that contribute to their heightened risk for suicide.

This curriculum focuses on improving service delivery for LGBTQ youth and their families and aims to increase the competence and enhance the skill of child welfare staff working with LGBTQ youth in all types of out-of-home situations. It consists of eight modules that will provide information on the importance of improving child welfare practice with LGBTQ youth, including the impact and scope of LGBTQ youth in the foster care system; help participants to assess their own values and beliefs to identify strategies for balancing personal views with professional responsibilities; and increase competency in using accurate and culturally appropriate terminology. The modules also guide child welfare workers in assessing, supporting, and affirming young people in the process of “coming out,” provide effective engagement strategies for working with LGBTQ foster youth and families; describe strategies for advocating for LGBTQ youth in their homes, schools, foster care settings, and communities; and help participants identify ways that they can increase their learning and competence in working with LGBTQ youth and families.