Join the Movement: Activating Your Parent Village

“The most important part for us was having the parent voice be heard. We are all about making sure that parents have a seat at the table, nothing about us without us.”

Sarita Sashington of Be Strong Families offered this reflection on her experience organizing a Parent Village in this GLR Learning Tuesdays webinar Join the Movement: Activating Your Parent Village.

Sashington was joined by Dr. Dana Suskind and Yolie Flores, both with the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, and Rosa Guzman Snyder and Kendra Smiley of the National Center for Families Learning. Together, they discussed the Building a Parent Nation Campaign, which builds on Dr. Suskind’s recently-released book, Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise, and seeks to mobilize parents, caregivers and allies to fight for a society that better supports parents.

Using neuroscience as a framework, Parent Nation urges parents, caregivers and allies to advocate for a society that puts children and families at the center. In support of this call to action, Flores shared the innovative tools and resources that are now available at no cost to groups and organizations aligned with this mission and who wish to host Parent Villages to activate parents. Alberta Longone-Messer, a participant, shared their enthusiasm and agreement with this mission: “So important to share this program with community partners to help us launch and sustain,” because as Flores said, “all children should have the opportunity to reach their dreams, to reach their potential.”

Guzman Snyder, Smiley and Sashington shared their experiences in hosting Parent Villages during the beta test phase this past winter, including what inspired them to host a Village (“strong mission alignment” and “model driven by parents”); how parents responded (validated their strengths in ways that they could see themselves as changemakers); and what they saw as the potential for activating parent leadership and power (based on this experience, one parent made her own PowerPoint to share Parent Nation with other parents). Panelists shared that a key feature of the curriculum was the adaptability and flexibility to make it your own. And what was most powerful was the sense of solidarity of a community of parents to fight for change.

The resources and experiences shared by the presenters generated optimism and excitement for participants. Dr. Phillip G. Bevans commented, “Your commitment to providing parents and caregivers with the opportunity and support needed to learn and apply the skills that are known to build babies’ brains is, of course, quite revolutionary and much to be admired. Congratulations on making the effort to ‘create a population-level shift in the knowledge and behavior of parents and caregivers’ in this regard.”