Focus on Families! How to Build and Support Family-Centered Practices in After School

Children benefit when their parents or caregivers are actively involved in their out-of-school learning. Yet a new report by the Harvard Family Research Project and United Way of Massachusetts Bay finds that only a quarter of programs surveyed had effectively incorporated families. This guide, funded by the Wallace Foundation under its Parents and Communities for Kids initiative, offers after-school providers practical guidance on giving parents, guardians and other caregivers a more significant role in children's out-of-school learning, through specific strategies and three case studies. The guide has four sections. Section I presents current research on the benefits and challenges of engaging families after school. Section II describes four strategies that after school programs can use to engage families, drawing from current research and program examples to detail and illustrate these strategies in action. Section III offers in-depth profiles of three after school programs actively working to engage families. Engaging families is a journey, and practitioners need the skills and tools to track their progress in this work. For this reason, Section IV offers an approach and related tools for collecting information that can improve family engagement efforts. Additional information at the end of the guide includes a list of suggested readings and websites for engaging families. Program planners and leaders can use this guide to inform the design and implementation of a comprehensive or targeted family engagement component in an after school program. Other program staff can use this guide to gain general ideas and specific practices to apply to their own interactions with families. Finally, people interested in understanding how to improve their family engagement efforts can use the evaluation tools in this guide to conduct a needs assessment and document their practices as they relate to four key engagement strategies. (Contains 45 endnotes.) [This is a joint publication of: United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB); Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP); and Build the Out-of-School Time Network (BOSTnet). Funding for this manual was provided by The Wallace Foundation.]