Friends of the Family, Inc. works with private organizations, public agencies and local communities to initiate, provide quality assurance services, and garner resources to ensure the development of a strong family support network in Maryland, and to promote policies and programs that strengthen and support all members of families with young children to encourage healthy and productive lives.

Description:
Friends of the Family is a unique nonprofit that works in collaboration with public and private funders and community-based organizations and residents to support families with young children as they strive to reach their goals for their children and themselves, especially goals related to children's health and social and emotional well-being, and parents' education, employment, and parenting.

Friends of the Family as an intermediary organization provides funding, training, technical assistance, monitoring, evaluation, and other quality assurance services to the statewide network of 25 Family Support Centers in Maryland. These Centers serve pregnant women and young parents with children from birth through age three and provide comprehensive, preventive services related to child and parent health, early identification of and referral for developmental delays, improved parenting skills, increased use of family planning, and skill-building in family social and economic self-sufficiency and self-advocacy.

In addition to its coordination of Family Support Centers, all of which are supported through the intermediary with State funds provided by the Maryland State Department of Education and federal Early Head Start, Friends of the Family trains hundreds of participants from numerous education and social service agencies and child care programs statewide in all aspects of family and child development.

Friends of the Family offers a regional Parent Leadership Institute that develops participants' skills to competently lead their families. The organization sponsors seminars and workshops that feature experts in various aspects of family or infant development; provides a toll-free help-line service for child care providers; and operates a lending library for early childhood practitioners and those working with young families, including those headed by adolescent parents.

History:
Maryland's Friends of the Family (FOF) and the network of Family Support Centers (FSCs) represent the pursuit of a vision. The first 4 FSCs and FOF were established in 1986, after a group of parents, State and local leaders, child care and adolescent pregnancy advocates, child development specialists, and leaders in the foundation community had met and planned for nearly two years. The group was searching for a better way to address some of the State's most pressing social problems and to put in place a prevention mechanism, a front end, to the State's crisis-oriented human services delivery system. The specific catalysts for the effort were the State's skyrocketing reports of child abuse and neglect and resulting foster care placements, its high teenage pregnancy rate, and growing recognition of the relationships between adolescent parenting and long-term welfare dependency; limited success in education and job attainment; and negative outcomes for the children of teenagers (Bane and Ellwood, 1983; Ellwood, 1986; and Furstenburg, 1987). Since their beginnings, the FSCs' goal has been to provide comprehensive, culturally-sensitive, community-based, preventive services to families who live in neighborhoods that show high concentrations of a variety of risk factors known to be predictive of long-term welfare dependency and poverty.

Contact people:

Margaret Williams, Executive Director, (phone), (email) Linda Ramsey, Deputy Director, (phone), (email) Cathy Zawadowicz, Office Manager, (phone), (email)

Address:

1001 Eastern Avenue, 2nd Floor Baltimore, MD 21202 (See a map)