The New Generations Project: Optimizing Services for Parents, Caregivers, and Families
Southcentral Foundation offers many programs and initiatives to support customer-owners in achieving physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. One project SCF has undertaken to this end is the New Generations Project. This project aims to optimize the effectiveness of services that support families in the preparation for and care of new generations by inventorying current work, learning from internal and external best practices, engaging SCF and community stakeholders and creating a coordinated, system approach to be deployed by December 2023.
Services provided through the New Generations Project seek to address the nutritional, physical, behavioral, and intellectual needs of families while focusing on a connection to culture. A main component of the project is a focus on infant and early childhood mental health. To that end, SCF collaborated with the Alaska Association for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health as well as two external experts in the field to create training content for staff to better support families. Additionally, the Strengthening Families Protective Factor Framework, was adopted as the key building block for all parenting skill-building initiatives. Protective factors are important in reducing the incidence and severity of childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
Another aspect of the program is the idea of parent partners. This is a new service model for preconception, prenatal, and early childcare offered as a new standard of care with an enhanced focus on emotional support, family, and parenting based on the needs and goals of the customer-owner families. Parent partners are caregivers who are parents themselves, and will work with customer-owners during visits where they share conversation through story about what matters most to the family, explore the topics the family is most interested in, and support a path for reaching family goals that are strength-based.
SCF is currently listening to customer-owner feedback and analyzing results from early program implementation. Improvements will be made based on this feedback and analysis before the program is deployed. For more information about the New Generations project, or other aspects of SCF’s Nuka System of Care, feel free to contact the SCF Learning Institute.
