The Family Nurturing Center

Key successes are:
1) Improved child and family outcomes, such as reduced rates of foster care placement, child abuse and children being removed from their home, decreased behavioral issues, increased emotional regulation 2) positive relationships with families that allow staff members to provide needed items (such as clothing and diapers) and valuable services, including home visits, therapeutic classrooms and respite care 3) positive community engagement 4) children and families connected to community services, such as early intervention, mental health services, medical care and other resources 5) keeping families together by preventing abuse and neglect

Other successes are a reduction of emergency room usage, improved family economic stability, increased literacy and school readiness, which has a significant impact on a child's experience and, as a result, their career and future success.

FNC services build resilience through a strengths-based approach, accomplished by supporting children's safety, strengthening the family, increasing protective factors, helping families to meet basic needs, supporting social/emotional development and self-regulation, developing problem-solving/crisis management skills and, importantly, building secure attachments and support systems. By supporting children and families to heal, cultivating innate strengths, and providing interventions to break the cycle of abuse and neglect, FNC works to build a resilient community of families who are able to raise safe thriving children.

As a tool, Family Nurturing Center uses the Strengthening Families framework, as the foundation for all of our programs and services. This frameworks helps early childhood programs identify concrete and specific ways to engage and support parents and caregivers. It is framed around five protective factors demonstrated by research, to be linked to optimal child development and reduced rates of child abuse and neglect. Protective factors include: nurturing and attachment, knowledge of parenting and child development, parental resilience, social connections, concrete supports and social and emotional competence of children.

Trauma informed practices guide processes, interactions, and the physical environment at FNC, which is a safe space where adults behave and react in a predictable manner with children and parents, and staff are trustworthy, transparent, and respect confidentiality. Children and parents are treated respectfully as unique individuals and staff are able to understand trauma responses, and avoid triggers and re-traumatization. FNC seeks to increase families' felt sense of safety, and restore power through building skills and providing opportunities for choice and self-direction. All FNC staff receive ongoing training in trauma and trauma informed care, they have manageable caseloads, and receive weekly reflective supervision so that they are able to exercise self-care and process the vicarious trauma that they experience through their work.

In summary:
We help parents keep their children safely within their own families
We support children as they heal from difficult life experiences
We wrap an array of services around families in crisis helping them rebuild their lives and raise healthy and thriving children
We focus on bonding and attachment in all family support programs
We build protective factors in order to reduce the likelihood of abuse
We stabilize families so that they can thrive instead of survive

Family Nurturing Center is continually proven to be an industry leader for high quality early learning in the following ways:
• Achieved Quality Assurance Rating of 4 (highest ranking 5)-influenced heavily by staff qualifications
• Majority of care coordinators are either QMHA or QMHP qualified. "An individual possessing at least a master's degree in counseling and guidance, rehabilitation counseling, social work, vocational counseling, psychology, pastoral counseling, or family therapy or related field, who has successfully completed a practicum or internship that included a minimum of 1,000 hours of supervised direct service in a mental health setting, or who has one year of clinical experience under the supervision of a QMHP."
• FNC staff must meet qualifications for Oregon's Child Care Registry (audited annually), Relief Nursery standards (audited every two years) and meet Oregon Health Authority's standards (reviewed annually).

According to Jackson Care Connect, Care Oregon's local Coordinated Care Organization, “Family Nurturing Center is a high performing non-profit agency serving some of the most vulnerable families in Southern Oregon".

As a result of utilizing high quality, compassionate staff, FNC has a significant history of supporting vulnerable families, as well as a strong base of stakeholder support (parents, volunteers, donors, foundations and community partners).

The Family Nurturing Center has grown from serving 3 kids in the beginning to over 600 each year. The agency has grown from one location, to three, serving both Jackson and Josephine counties. Recently we have received our children's mental health accreditation, expanded our farm and food program to operate a 25 acre farm, reunified over 100 children with their families in two years in of operating the LIFE program and housed over 45 families in the last year, providing intensive case management and in-home parenting.

With the current Opioid epidemic, a mental health crisis in our region and a vacancy rate of less than 1%, families have more challenges surrounding them than ever before. To combat this, our agency is about to embark on a community revitalization project, that will add over 27 units of low-income housing to the neighborhood. With a 50% mobility rate, a homeless rate that is one of the worst in the state, and child abuse and foster care at an all time high, our work is far from over. In fact, the best way to make systemic change is just that - work to improve the system that make navigation for families so difficult.

Family Nurturing Center has been active in the early childhood system-building arena since our inception (2006), helping to develop the structures, behaviors, and connections that make all the components of an early childhood system operate as a whole to promote shared results for children and families. This local effort is now being coordinated by the Southern Oregon Early Learning Council among early childhood providers, in which FNC is an active participant and thought partner. Family Nurturing Center has also been part of the West Medford P-3 initiative, helping Jackson Elementary School to become a trauma informed school, providing specialized training to teaching staff in the areas of strengthening families, trauma, home visitation, mindfulness and treating parents as partners. In an effort to reach beyond the early learning and education system, FNC has entered into a formal partnership called the “Rogue Challenge". This cross-sector collaboration includes six other non-profit agencies all working toward a common goal of improving systems to better meet the needs of children and families. Each service sector contributes important aspects to the system and to the desired result of thriving children and families.

We recognize that alone, we may not be able to move the needle, but collectively, we have the ability to create a trauma informed system of care that goes well beyond meeting families' basic needs. The goal of influencing systems is to address the largest public health crisis of our time, adverse childhood experiences of epidemic proportion. Collectively, we can help put families on the path to self-reliance and well-being, while giving kids the start they deserve, so that they can become contributing members of society and realize their full human potential.