FAMIIY PARTNERSHIPS

Family partnership is defined as “the intentional practice of working with families for the ultimate goal of positive outcomes in all areas through the life course. Family engagement reflects a belief in the value of the family leadership at all levels from an individual, community and policy level.”

Guam Title V understands and appreciates the benefits that come from collaboration with families. Promoting and strengthening family partnerships remains a crucial area of focus. Families bring valuable input and perspective to inform program development and priorities, including knowing their family strengths and individual needs.

In the five-year MCH Needs Assessment, findings across population domains reinforced the importance of family and consumer partnership in MCH programs. Stakeholders identified the need to collaborate, partner, seek advisement from clients, families, and communities to address the needs and solutions. Effective family partnerships include respecting a person's culture and considering those factors in program development and service provision. Ultimately, understanding unique family and community needs helps to improve outcomes and eliminate service barriers.

The Guam WIC Program enjoys family involvement. The Guam WIC Program has breastfeeding peer counselors who work with WIC clients across the island. While not Certified Lactation Counselors (CLC), these peer counselors help new moms as they navigate breastfeeding initiation by offering support and resources.

Guam Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Program (EHDI) engages families of infants with hearing loss in all aspects of the program by providing information and emotional support to families of infants newly diagnosed with hearing loss; actively recruiting parents for the EHDI Advisory Committee, surveying parents about their experiences and successes and program opportunities for improvement.

The Guam Family Planning (FP) Program requires Information and Education initiatives in program promotion, community outreach, and an Advisory Committee that includes a family partnership. An example of this initiative includes engaging with families at health fairs and village outreaches. However, due to Covid 19, many FP staff have been redirected to Covid activities.

The Guam Head Start Program recognizes that parent and family engagement is essential at every level for children's school readiness and success. Parents are the most critical influence on a child's development. Because of this, Head Start is based on a partnership between parents and staff. Building a trusting, collaborative relationship between parents and staff allows them to share with and learn from one another. Participation in parent-child projects and/or activities as classroom volunteers, parents know more about their child's development and their role as the primary educator of their children.

In the Early Intervention Program, families are involved in determining eligibility and delivery of early intervention services. The Guam Early Intervention Program has an Advisory Council, the Guam Interagency Coordinating Council (GICC), which guides all programmatic activities. The members of the GICC comprises a minimum of 20% family members, including parents of infants or toddlers with disabilities or children with disabilities age 12 or younger, with knowledge of, or experience with, programs for infants and toddlers with disabilities, at least parent member must be a parent of an infant or toddler with disabilities or a child with a disability aged six years or younger. Families are also surveyed annually on their experiences with the program and their outcomes, including the ability of the program to increase their knowledge of their legal rights, their ability to advocate for their child’s concerns, and their ability to support their child’s learning and development.

Continuous family engagement occurs with programs such as the Family Health Information Resource Center (FHIRC), Project Bisita (Guam's MIECHV program), and the Preschool Development Grant (PDG). Title V has a special relationship with FHIRC. The strong partnership that FHIRC has with Guam Title V allows FHIRC to provide family-centered, family engagement services for families across Guam. Sadly, since March 2020, the pandemic has caused gaps in service provision for children; parents in the tourist-dependent industry have lost their jobs, thereby losing health insurance, and fear of contracting Covid 19 made families terrified. FHIRC work continued despite the challenges. The focus was on telecommunicating with families via phone calls, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other apps. This ensured that families with disabilities and chronic health conditions received up-to-date, accurate, and relevant information about the Covid virus.

Guam’s MIECHV Program (Project Bisita) supports families beginning with prenatal care and can extend as long as three to five years after the child is born. Before the current health crisis, home visitors were a critical link for new and expectant parents, providing one-to-one support at no cost to eligible families, promoting infant, and child health to foster educational development and school readiness, and to help to prevent child abuse neglect. Now more than ever, home visiting is an essential service for families as they navigate social isolation, economic uncertainty, the challenge of balancing work without childcare, and other unique and heightened stressors brought on by the Covid 19 pandemic.

The Guam Preschool Development Grant (PDG) offers an unprecedented opportunity for Guam to assess and improve its early childhood system. It also provides a framework to bring together the combined resources and expertise of government agencies, early childhood and K-12 educators, community leaders, nonprofits, and an array of private sector interests for a common goal – to improve the developmental outcomes of our island's youngest children.

Guam’s PDG will build on those strengths by focusing on community-level needs and improving the alignment and effectiveness of early childhood systems. Activities funded through the grant will closely involve parents as the key stakeholders in guiding children’s early learning and development. Three Strengthening Families Parent Cafés were held virtually in 2021:

1. “Taking Care of Yourself” – there were 20 parents that attended.
2. “Being a Strong Parent” - there were seven parents that attended.
3. “Building a Strong Relationship with Your Child” - seven parents attended.

Guam PDG, in collaboration with Guam CEDDERS, shifted the person-to-person Village Play Time to a “Virtual Village Play Time” video production. Three informational videos on Developmentally Appropriate Practices for young children were developed. Furthermore, the videos are the beginning of a series of videos to be produced throughout 2022 that will focus on Early Childhood practices of the various Pacific Island cultures that make Guam their home and feature them in culturally appropriate and responsive settings.