ESPAŅOL | POLSKI

Family Bridges Curriculum

To register for any of these programs click here.

Couples:

Exploring Relationships and Marriage with Fragile Families 
Developed by the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development and the State of Louisiana Department of Human Resources. The Curriculum emerged from the need for relationships and marriage education relevant to low-income communities, particularly those who have grown up in and been influenced by hip-hop culture. This eight-session curriculum infuses culturally-relevant tools and techniques into interactive, skill-building activities that use real-world scenarios based on issues that are distinct to low-income communities. Focused on communication skills, conflict resolution, personal and familial goal setting, effective parenting, and planning for the future, the curriculum is relevant to low-income mothers and fathers interested in strengthening their relationships, exploring marriage, and providing a healthy and safe environment for their children.

The Couple: The Strongest Link

Developed by Family Wellness Associates, who have worked with culturally diverse and low- income communities for over thirty-eight years. Tailored specifically for urban low-income communities, but also for migrant camps, refugee camps, reservations, and community housing projects. This program is engaging and has a hands on approach beginning with low risk exercises using immediate support, examples and practice. The program uses a lot of role-plays where situations are scripted around different values, level of need for physical intimacy, money, issues, dealing with criticism, and having/raising children. The core sessions include communication management, intimacy, and paying back your community with the skills learned. 

Within Our Reach

A new curriculum from PREP to help low-income couples achieve their goals in marriage, family and relationships. The curriculum is designed to build on the existing strengths of couples and add critical life and relationship skills that will help participants create safer, more stable couple relationships, and by extension, better environments for their children. Within Our Reach was developed with a careful eye on the implications of research on fragile families and low-income couples. This literature informs Within Our Reach by identifying issues that place low-income couples at higher risk for relationship difficulties as well as significant barriers to marriage and marital success.

Families:

Family Wellness
The basic Survival Skills for Healthy Families is a twelve-hour Family Wellness program presented to large groups of families and individuals in a series of six two-hour sessions:

  • Parents in Healthy Families 
  • Children in Healthy Families 
  • Adult Relationships, Couples in Healthy Families 
  • Solving Family Problems 
  • Sex, Drugs, and You: Passing on Your Values to Your Children

 

Each session is organized around practical guidelines for healthy family interactions that are demonstrated and then practiced with the participants. There have been over 1,500 trained instructors presenting this course to over 500,000 families in the past nineteen years. The course is a proven model for teaching skills, enhancing healthy family interactions, and investing family members in each other and their community. This empirically validated program was developed with a focus on low-income and multi-cultural communities. 

Singles:

How To Avoid Marrying A Jerk Or Jerkette

The Premarital Interpersonal Choices and Knowledge (P.I.C.K.) is an enjoyable but practical, research-based program for single adults who are looking for, or in between, relationships. It covers how to balance your heart and your head when starting a new relationship, as well as how to determine if you are compatible. P.I.C.K. is a practical, easy-to-understand program created to teach singles the essentials of communication and conflict resolutions skills. P.I.C.K. has shown positive evaluation results by participants reporting feeling more knowledgeable and more confident in their abilities to use the skills learned to develop a healthy relationship.

Within My Reach

Within My Reach (WMR) is designed for young single mothers. WMR, a research-based thirty-hour program developed by Prevention Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), is a non-couples based curriculum designed to help economically disadvantaged individuals who are at risk for poor quality relationships and relationship instability. This program will be offered to non-married expectant mothers and fathers and new parents, and those in viable relationships, to cultivate, protect, and stabilize their union, including reaching for their dreams of eventually being married if they desire. It seeks to help those in damaging relationships to leave safely; and those who desire a romantic relationship and marriage in the future to choose partners wisely: to decide about, rather than slide through, major relationship transitions.

Students 

Love U2: Getting Smarter about Relationships, Sex, Babies, and Marriage, The Dibble Fund
A new kind of curriculum for teens. It looks beyond the do's and don’ts of sex to the context of sexuality: namely, relationships. Its goal is to help young people acquire practical skills and useful knowledge for forming emotionally healthy, mutually respectful, and ethically sound relationships. But Love U2 is about more than skills or facts. It focuses on helping teens craft a North Star vision of healthy relationships that will guide their own behavior. Teens today live and breathe in a culture emphasizing casual sex and casual connections where no relationship can be trusted to last and where even the most important family bonds can’t be counted on. Indeed for some teens, sex is seen simply as a transaction. Teens are short on positive models. They have few roadmaps that will lead them into healthy relationships and away from destructive ones. Love U2 aims at giving teens a positive, inspirational model for committed and healthy love relationships. This curriculum is about what teens can hope to achieve, not just what they must try to avoid. This program will be offered along with Welcome to The Real World curriculum developed by University of Illinois Extension.

Welcome to the Real World!Consists of four parts: career exploration, expenditure decision-making, money management, and choice evaluation. The program is an active, hands-on experience, which gives young people the opportunity to explore career opportunities and make lifestyle and budget choices similar to those adults face on a daily basis. In this simulation of the real world, participants are to assume that they have completed basic educational requirements for their chosen career and are single, 25 years of age, and independent with no financial support from family or others. The participants explore potential careers or occupations that they would like to pursue in the future. After they choose an occupation, they receive a monthly salary for the occupation and then proceed through the Real World activity, deducting taxes, determining savings amount, and spending their “salary” on the necessary and luxury items that reflect the occupation and lifestyle they have chosen. 

Why have we chosen these listed curricula?

Curriculums have been selected based upon their status as evidence-based practices and their ease of implementation by grassroots organizations. Relationship education will be delivered primarily in a group setting.

To register for any of these programs click here.