Parent Leader - Chicago Heights, IL

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The primary criteria for recruiting these parent leaders is your passion, desire, and enthusiasm for making positive changes in their family and community. There are minimal age restrictions and all community residents who consider themselves parents are eligible for volunteering, including teen parents, grandparents, foster parents, and non-custodial fathers. Previous experience with and training by Strengthening Families Illinois will be considered a plus. The project is highly structured and facilitated through a comprehensive implementation manual.

Once parent leaders are trained, they will form teams to design and implement service projects which will contribute to building protective factors in their community. Service projects will be designed with an eye toward making a positive contribution to the community. There will be service projects for each community including: working with the Health & Wellness team and scheduling ongoing parent cafes (or other ways to teach parents in the community about the protective factors and assist them with strengthening their families).

Peer-to-peer community outreach using Parent Leaders is an effective and empowering way to engage residents in ongoing conversation around violence prevention, mental wellness and positive coping strategies to stress and trauma. In this component of the Parent Leadership Training Initiative (PLTI), the Parent Leadership in Action Network (PLAN) will:

1. Identify low-income parents and other caregivers of color in various communities who have been "through the fire" in dealing with their own issues (life struggles) and have navigated the tricky waters and challenges of raising adolescents;
2. Recruit these parents for volunteerism (8 hours per week) doing community education and outreach to their peers (other parents of adolescents);
3. Arm these parents with content (mental wellness) communications, training on prevention (violence) strategies and leadership training;
4. Provide ongoing personal development opportunities, including group activities; and
5. Prepare these new parent leaders to become "go-to" resources in the neighborhood.
6. Document the impact of COVID-19 on each family's stability.

Parent Leaders will share information with the community in a series of one-hour outreach/interpersonal dialogue sessions. This will include:

• One-on-one, parent-to-parent dialogues.
• In-home interpersonal dialogues (with 2-3 adults);
• Small-group sessions (2-5 people);
• Parent workshops (5-10) or parent cafés (15+); and
• Community events (public).

Complete the online application at:
https://bit.ly/AWOFINCLeadershipTraining

Follow the PIRC and Parent Leader activities at:

https://www.facebook.com/AWOFINC.PIRC