Parents that had personally worked with the Family Place were invited to share their stories about how the Family Place has impacted their parenting skills and reshaped their families. The event had two guest speakers: Bill Boyle, MD, Boyle Community Pediatrics Program at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and Carl Pratt, General Manager at the Hanover Inn.
Dr. Boyle has worked with medical students and DHMC residents to provide community outreach sessions where they spent time at organizations such as the Family Place or the Haven to interact with community members and learn about the invisible triggers of illness that may not be apparent within a fifteen minute check up. Dr. Boyle spoke about chronic illnesses that children may battle, whether its asthma, chronic fibrosis, or development delays, and noted that when you combined that with a chronic state of poverty - you have a serious problem.
Julia Dickenson told me about a resident within Dr. Boyle's program that met a child at the Haven, who had just weeks ago been at a check-up at the DHMC. At the home visit (which is the beautiful thing about this program, residential and case managers visit the patient at their own home, where the child is comfortable and where the home environment can provide vital indicators of mental and medical health), the parent didn't recognize the resident, since he wasn't in his medical garb. The resident told Julia, that just a few weeks ago, they seemed completely fine. He had no idea that the family was "about to go homeless."
Elaine Guanet, the Executive Director at the Family Place, opened up the event with a short speech about what the Family Place does and its special place in the Upper Valley service community. The Family Place strives to create a better future for children by supporting families. Elaine noted that "parenting creates human potential; brains are built from bottom to up, skills beget skills and motivation begets motivation." Poverty is the largest single threat to a child’s well being as a result of severed social networks, access to civic involvement, and the built up of human/social capital. The Family Place is a designated family child center in Windsor County; it serves 36 towns, on both sides of the river.
The Family Place has many layers of programming. One of them is FIT (Families, Infants, and Toddlers). It is connected to a federal program that provides service to poverty-stricken families with children that are battling developmental delays. Doctors from the DHMC and other medical facilities visit children at the actual home and help children overcome barriers in cognitive development. As Dr. Boyle, from the DHMC, noted: when you combine chronic medical conditions with a chronic state of poverty, you have a real problem.
Another program is the FLT (Families Learning Together) program. The program enlists young mothers, aged 17 – 28. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 8:30 to 3:30 PM, these mothers come to the Family Place to learn a set of life skills. This includes four work sites, parenting (at the day care, run by Brenda), nutritional eating (includes cooking lunch daily at the kitchen, with Havah from King Arthur’s Flour), education (completing GED or high school diploma, computer class), and jewelry (making jewelry from the JewelryO’s business with Julia at the jewelry studio). Katy, an FLT participant, became pregnant at 17 and had her first child a week after her 18th birthday. FLT helped her finish her GED and enabled her to take a college course at Simmons College. She noted that the most important part of this program is that really made you feel part of a larger community.
My budget/debt counseling class fuses the education and the jewelry worksites by providing participants an opportunity to take what they’ve learned about profit, stock, deadlines, and skills in beading, crocheting, and selling jewelry at weekly jewelry fairs and funnel that education into something that directly helps them help themselves.
My project is about these women discovering fiscal accountability and entrepreneurship as a bridge out of poverty.
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