Empowering Parents: Developing Support, Leadership, Advocacy, and Activism. Child Care Action Campaign Issue Brief #2.

This report from a 1995 Child Care Action Campaign national audioconference examines approaches to empowering parents through developing support, leadership, advocacy, and activism to better enable low-income parents to become effective change agents. The report describes the experiences of three parent programs, which found that parents typically help their children first, recognize the interests they share with other parents, and then take an increasingly active role in programs, institutions, and public policies that directly influence their lives. The first program described, the Parent Services Project (California), offers low-income parents the opportunity to take responsibility for organizing social and educational activities and managing resources to carry them out. This program confirms to the child care center staff that parents are assets to their children's development. The second program, Parent Leadership Institute (Connecticut), trains parents to work as community activists and child advocates in school systems and local government. Parents who participated in this 9-month training program have raised funds and organized courses for parents in their children's schools, and have effectively dealt with city government officials to rectify dangerous situations in the school. The third program, Parents United for Child Care (Massachusetts), has organized 1,500 parents to identify, lobby for, and pursue specific improvements in child care funding and programs to meet their family needs. This group has expanded school-age child care, developed and expanded care and education for preschool children, and increased child care funding for welfare recipients and working poor participants in education and training. (KB)