Parent Leadership Program

Parent Leadership

Parents play a vital role in our communities. They improve the lives of their families, neighbors, and communities by nurturing their children, lending a helping hand to others, partnering with community resources, and advocating for initiatives that support children and families. Building the skills and confidence of parents as advocates for themselves and their families is part of our approach across all our programs and is the focus of our Parents as Leaders program.

Parents as Leaders Program

The Parents as Leaders program provides training to parents with expertise navigating family service systems so that they can share the wisdom of their experience with policy makers, family-serving agencies and organizations, and other families in the community.

The program helps parent leaders build knowledge and skills on topics including strategic storytelling, imposter syndrome, advocacy in children’s mental health, child welfare, juvenile justice, and educations systems, NEAR Science (Neurobiology, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Resilience), and more. Parent leaders then have opportunities to participate in systems workgroups.

As part of this program FamilyWise also provides training to systems leaders about how to welcome and authentically engage parents in decision-making processes.

“Nobody can know what it's like to go through something if they haven't been through it. You can't learn that in a book. That is the beauty of how parents with lived experience are uniquely positioned to create change.” -- FamilyWise Parent Partner

Parent Leadership Conference

Every February, in recognition of National Parent Leadership Month, FamilyWise holds an event centered on parent leadership. Read more about our 2024 event, which brought parents and community and systems leaders together for conversation and learning about how we can address parental stress and support family wellbeing by listening to the wisdom of parents in our communities.