The Family Strengthening Programme
Building resilience against childhood trauma
Our Family Strengthening Programme takes on a more holistic approach to ensure that each child receives vital development and therapeutic services, while their parents are supported during their incarceration, and during their reintegration into society. The Programme is supported by our Systemic Practice Pyramid.
About Systemic Practice
Our curriculum for our programme utilises a Family Systems approach to explore multiple-levels of interaction and relationships: the individual, their family and community/ social systems. This enhanced Family Systems approach is a more robust system focusing on empowering every member of the family.
We’ve streamlined our approach to three prongs: Befriending, Incare, and Family Care – to ensure that each child receives vital development and therapeutic services, while their parents are supported during their incarceration, and during their reintegration into society.
Befriending
Trained volunteers (Learning Friends) visit the homes of our children every week to mentor and read to them.
During this time, our Learning Friends engage the child to not only coach them through creative activities and play, but also build on their confidence.
Incare (Dear Papa/ Mama)
This course is conducted by our therapists to provide self-awareness and communication skills to mothers and fathers to help them rebuild their relationships with their children, and most importantly with themselves. During this programme, which includes Family Joint Visits, mothers and fathers share messages of encouragement and love through writing short stories to their children.
They also record themselves reading the stories so that their children can listen to the voices of their mothers and fathers even while separated by prison walls.
Family Care
Guided by the Systemic Practice approach, we focus on the whole family system rather than the individual, ensuring that the whole family is involved in the reintegration of the ex-offender. Each family is supported by our therapists and go through a therapeutic and developmental journey which includes family counselling, play therapy and case work management.
Our therapists and case workers visit the homes of the families at least once a month to ensure that they are effectively supported throughout their journey.
Our Success
With the support of our volunteers and stakeholders, we have been able to provide reading programmes and counselling to over 300 children since 2014.
Read the stories below to learn more about our initiatives and how we have helped our beneficiaries.
