Coram Family (Greenwich On Track)
Key Facts
Location
Project Criteria
Project funding
£100,000
Funding round
Coram Family is the UK's oldest children's charity having been established in 1739 when Captain Thomas Coram built the foundling hospital in Bloomsbury to accommodate abandoned children. We provide a range of innovative, high quality services, designed to promote resilience in vulnerable children, young people and their families.
Apart from its adoption, fostering and contact services, it is home to Coram Parents Centre, a universal, open-access centre for families from the Kings Cross area of London, which provides both general and specialised services to parents.
We are using the Parenting Fund to benefit families living in the London Borough of Greenwich currently served by the 'On Track' programme in Thamesmead. In addition, we will introduce parenting support work to the families of students attending Eltham Green Community Sports College in the south of the borough.
'Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities' is a community based 16-week groupwork programme developed in the USA by Marilyn Steel and adapted for UK use in October 2000 by the Race Equality Unit. The programme is self-affirming, non-judgemental and actively promotes diversity, culture and community. It is an ideal vehicle for supporting and encouraging parents because it in non-stigmatising and draws on the cultural components that influence their beliefs, values and behaviour.
The aims of the 'Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities' programme are:
- to promote 'protective factors' associated with good parenting
- to reduce 'risk factors' - particularly in the way 'poor' or inconsistent parenting can impact on children and young people
- to help families to develop strong ethnic and cultural roots, positive parent/child relationships, self-esteem and social competence.
The programme will be used in two areas of Greenwich in slightly different ways:
In Thamesmead
- to promote and maintain effective partnerships between parents and social, health and educational institutions
- to equip parents with the necessary knowledge and skills to access and work with community resources.
At Eltham Green
- to develop and consolidate access and take up of facilities and services available through the Extended Schools initiative, with a particular focus on supporting parents whose children are making the transition from primary to secondary school
- to contribute to the development of training materials to support the adoption of the programme within the national Extended Schools initiative.
In both areas
- At least eight parents will be supported and trained to become future group facilitators and four to become crèche workers.