|
Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education Training
Project Overview
In Fall 2008, University of Missouri (MU) Extension, in partnership with the National Extension Relationship & Marriage Education Network (NERMEN), the MU School of Social Work, and the Missouri Children’s Division received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families for the Children’s Bureau’s Curriculum and Development and Evaluation for Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education project.
The goal of the Healthy Relationship and Marriage Education Training Project (HRMET) is to meet the safety, permanency, and well-being needs of vulnerable children and reduce racial disproportionality in the child welfare system. HRMET’s approach is to increase child welfare workers’ access to relationship and marriage education (RME) by creating a cost-effective and sustainable multi-state, five-tier delivery saturation model that brings together NERMEN’s existing resources and experiences, MU Extension’s experience and linkages from two recent federal Healthy Marriage grants, the MU School of Social Work’s experience developing curricula and training child welfare workers, and an eight-state team of the nation’s leading Extension Specialists in Human Development and Family Studies.
During the course of the five-year grant, Social Work and Human Development and Family Studies graduate students will benefit from graduate level courses offered by the University of Missouri and North Carolina State University. National partners from four states, Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arkansas will offer community workshops to existing child welfare workers, clergy, county extension specialists, and other helping professionals. In addition, students and child welfare workers across the nation will have the opportunity to receive training from online interactive classes or an independent study graduate level course. These trainings will ultimately benefit families involved within the child welfare system and foster parents who provide care for children. Specific target populations include families who have few resources, single parents, immigrant families, and ethnically diverse families.
The HRMET project will employ several members of the core NERMEN Working Group, all of whom were specially selected because of their leadership within Extension and in their states in RME. This team has already developed multiple resources (e.g., curriculum materials, newsletters, fact sheets) in the area of RME that are widely used. They have also been involved in empirically documenting the impact of RME programs, have published in peer reviewed journals on the research and practice associated with RME, have presented on research and best practices for RME to state and national audiences, and developed RME online tools and resources for both professionals and community members. They are each experienced collaborators on RME projects in their states and have developed strong partnerships with state and national organizations.
Funding for this project was provided by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Grant: 90CT0151.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.
Last update: Tuesday, May 05, 2009
|
||||||||
