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Building Strong Communities Through Family Engagement: An Interview with Tameka Caldwell
By Alix Mammina, Senior Communications Specialist, Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing
Across Texas, Family Resource Centers serve as centralized hubs offering support to families in need. Based on school campuses or within communities, these centers provide services ranging from housing and employment to parenting and leadership classes.
In her work at the Texas Alliance of Child and Family Services, Tameka Caldwell uses her decades of experience in child welfare to help build and grow Family Resource Centers throughout the state. We sat down with her to learn more about how the centers engage families to build stronger and more connected communities.
How did you get involved in this work?
What led me to this work was my previous role as a program manager in a home visiting program. I’ve been in this field for over 24 years in different roles, but that was the first time that I worked with families in what most would consider an upstream prevention space, a voluntary home visiting program. These are families that just want to learn more about how to be the best parents they can be and how to support their children’s development.
And that was probably one of the most impactful experiences in my career, because the program provided families with tools, education, resources, and it also provided this partnership with families. I think of situations where families were struggling with basic needs and because of the services and supports offered through the home visiting program, you’re seeing families get started, building assets and becoming more self-sufficient.
What does your work on Family Resource Centers look like?
We provide support through the Texas Family Support Network, which is a statewide network supporting Family Resource Centers (FRCs), and we’re also a member of the National Family Support Network. In 2021, we were invited to collaborate and partner with what is now Family Support Services with the Department of Health and Human Services to support the FRCs that they fund.
Currently, we provide technical assistance and training. We also establish the collective impact of FRCs across the state in different geographical areas, and we walk alongside them in their journey. Many of the FRCs we’re supporting have started from the ground up.
How do FRCs work to engage families?
Primarily there are five core services and supports that the FRCs in the Texas Family Support Network provide. And it could be a combination of these things—FRCs look different. But primarily we’re looking at the core services of resource navigation, parenting support, child development activities, and community strengthening.
Every FRC that we’re supporting has a staff whose role is resource navigation. That staff member connects families to other resources internally within the organization, but also externally. There’s also an element of child development activities. Some of the FRCs have specific programming, such as home visiting, and programming specific to the child development activities and elements.
The most important part of an FRC is parent leadership development. FRCs are for and with the community, and so to meet the needs of the community, you have to invite the community to share the table. And so there’s an element of parent leadership development that is also crucial in FRC work. Many of the FRCs also have what’s called a parent advisory committee, which advises programming, decisions, and next steps for the FRC. That’s a really important part of the work, and there’s that partnership with the community and the voice of the community.
It sounds like this work is deeply embedded in and determined by the community. How do you create universal guidelines for the work that FRCs do when each of them are so unique?
A foundational training we offer to FRCs we work with in the Texas Family Support Network is called the Standards of Quality for Family Strengthening & Support. And this foundational training provides some of those tools that you’re asking about. One of the five sections of the training is family centeredness, and that whole section is really about, how do we bring in and engage families? There’s a saying that we need to invite families to the table. But how do we create a table with the family? How do we center them and their needs as an integral part of FRC work?
Another section is family strengthening, understanding all families are different, all FRCs are different, but all families have strengths. So what are those strengths that they bring to the table to your FRC? How can we utilize those strengths to not only help the FRC, but also help their family and other families?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion can be a controversial topic, but in the context of FRCs, it’s just valuing, respecting, and embracing families’ differences and the community’s differences. It involves identifying equitable or inequitable opportunities available to the families in that community. These are the things that guide how we do family engagement.
Community strengthening is another section, and it’s another huge component. It’s bringing in those other partners and stakeholders in the community. This work is not something that is done by one entity or by the one organization that is overseeing it. It’s done also in partnership with other organizations, other individuals and other stakeholders, so that collaboration is another part of what guides family engagement.
Why do you think family engagement is important?
There’s a saying, “nothing about us, without us.” And that really speaks to those of us in the human service and social service field. Our goal is to help families, but we can’t help families without families. So the family engagement part is acknowledging we can’t help families without input from families themselves.
The beauty in the diversity of families is also what I appreciate about family engagement. No one family is the same. If you’re talking and working with families in a rural setting, that’s a different culture than in a more urban setting. And so engaging families brings that diversified voice to the table. Family engagement also allows us to share power with families. In unison, we create solutions that best impact them and other families in the community.
Do you have an example of when you successfully engaged a family?
I’m thinking of a particular scenario where a parent reached out to an FRC for a basic need. They were struggling. They had two young children who were struggling. The FRC, through services and supports, met that basic need.
Fast forward, that parent, because they were stabilized, then enrolled in that FRC’s home visiting program. They completed that program, and over the course of maybe a year or two, started serving on the FRC’s Parent Advisory Committee. And now the parent is an employee at the FRC.
There are many stories like that, of how services and support can impact the family’s trajectory. It can impact the stability of a family and sustainability of that family to care not only for themselves, but also for their children. I call it reciprocity—you’re coming to receive, and then through the course of you stabilizing, you end up giving back.
What do you think is the key to successful family engagement?
Openness and willingness to hear from families, and value and respect of the family’s voice are important. Sometimes in family engagement, the invitation is the most important. In a lot of settings some families have not had positive experiences with programs or systems, and so sometimes just the invitation to hear opens a family’s willingness to share.
With family engagement it’s not the “table is ours, and we’re inviting you to the table.” Instead, it’s inviting you to build the table with us and create the table. And that’s a different lens than what some families are accustomed to. True family engagement is an ongoing, reciprocal process that ebbs and flows in different scenarios. But the through line is the families have just as important a seat at the table as the professionals and the organizations and the other stakeholders.
I truly feel the depths of my heart that work with families cannot be done without family engagement. We want to do work with families, and not just for families.
On the other side of that, what do you see as the main barriers to family engagement?
There can be a resistance to change, to have a voice that might not be a professional voice. Sometimes there’s a resistance and a discomfort to have families at the table or to engage families. And sometimes the differences in families can create a discomfort, which prevents us from extending and welcoming. We get caught up sometimes in doing things the way we’ve always done them. And I think family engagement is ever evolving. As a service provider, a program, an FRC, whatever your role is with families, if you don’t have a willingness to evolve, a willingness to continue to learn, an openness to hear and listen, those are barriers.
What advice would you give to professionals who want to improve their work and family engagement?
I’d encourage professionals to be lifelong learners. I encourage professionals to have a willingness and openness to learn about the different dynamics that make up families. Learn and immerse yourself in spaces where you’re with families that may not be like your family. Because it’s sometimes uncomfortable to serve families that you don’t necessarily understand. But that willingness to be vulnerable is a huge part of a family engagement, to be vulnerable enough to acknowledge that we as professionals don’t have all the answers, and that many of the answers that we’re seeking as professionals lie with the families.
I encourage that openness and willingness to sit in discomfort and know there’s nothing wrong with difference. There’s beauty in diversity. And I think of the analogy of the box of crayons. If all the crayons were all one color, it wouldn’t be as beautiful.
Read More:
Compassion Through Co-Design: Using Human-Centered Design to Promote Family Engagement
A Grandmother’s Love: Family Engagement and Kinship Care
Honoring Youth Voice in Adoption
Family Engagement as a Relational Approach