About Strive
Strive Online is a Family Time Provider and parent education and support program that was created by Partners for Our Children (P4C) under the University of Washington’s School of Social Work. It involves parents in the visitation process and prepares them for more quality time with their kids under trained visitation guides, or supervisors. Strive uses a strengths-based, trauma-informed approach to help parents nurture their relationship with their children from birth to the age of eight in a supervised setting, working closely with the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families and more than 100 stakeholders.
Every day in the US, almost 400,000 children and youth are living in foster or relative care. Their parents have a court-ordered right to see them in “supervised family time visits” but parents describe this time as terrifying, emotional and traumatic, mainly because they are being watched and judged without knowing what to expect at a time when the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Partners for Our Children wants to initiate change in the system and promote child safety, positive family functioning, and reduce trauma for parents and children. We see Family Time as an opportunity to engage parents and we developed the Strive Supervised Family Time Program to increase the quality of visits between parents and their children, reduce the trauma, and increase the likelihood of successful reunification. Strive’s strengths-based approach improves the family time experience by building trusting relationships between parents and the professionals involved in their family time, and fostering a sense of hope. This helps parents engage more fully in family time and ultimately, creates positive emotional connections with their children that are healing.
P4C has developed a five week in-person version of the Strive program and is developing an eLearning version which integrates Strive principles and has options for both providers and parents. This online version of Strive-based training could be used to train all family time supervisors in the principles for supporting parents, ensuring greater consistency in visit supervision across the state and maximizing the quality of family time. The parent version is a complementary training option that would provide support, knowledge, and skills for parents for their family time.
The eLearning modality allows for self-directed learning for both providers and parents to minimize barriers currently encountered with in-person Strive delivery. It also provides cost effective options to standardize family time provider training more broadly, especially when the in-person program is not feasible.
