Hannah's Family Center

Teach essential co-parenting skills to parents, whether they live together or apart Provide accessible and affordable wrap-around services to families in transition in a safe, secure and child-welcoming environment. Create peaceful solutions to family conflict in a research-to-practice setting. Train and engage a highly trained professional staff (in particular, Family Court expertise), to deliver critical services designed to reduce the mental, behavioral and social problems that frequently arise during the difficult transition of family breakup.

Founded in 1988, Hannah's Family Center (HFC) is an exceptional and respected community service organization providing powerful solutions to key issues facing children and families going through separation and breakup. Our goal is to build resilient families and ensure that children have the foundation of a healthy, safe relationship with each of their parents. In the past 32 years, we have served over 23,000 families and provided over 268,000 hours of warm, peaceful child-parent family time. We know that family functioning improves when all members of a family participate in multiple services and skill-building classes. We equip parents with the skills necessary to navigate and resolve the difficult issues that arise before, during and after family breakup. For families involved in Family Court, HFC fills a critical gap because there is no government funding for these families. We provide affordable services and research-to-practice programs that teach parents to co-parent peacefully and make the transition from one unhappy home to two happy homes. By preventing future mental, emotional and cognitive issues in children, we help to ease the economic and mental health toll on society and taxpayers. Hannah's Family Center is a San Diego Live Well Partner, and has a working collaboration with the Global Supervised Visitation Network and the Price Philanthropies City Heights programs. We have received repeat financial support from multiple San Diego foundations to move toward our goal of a more integrated service delivery program for low income and very low income Family Court parents and their children. We anticipate that this support will continue and, in fact, expand in the coming years. Not only do we receive consistent financial contributions from local foundations but have groups dedicated to completing large volunteer projects in the facility.

The most important measure of improvement in Family Court families is their perceived level of stress on a day-to-day basis. We have standardized stress measures for children and for adults. We administer these stress measures each time a family member receives a service via the Safe Passage Project. We also administer a Family Questionnaire at the beginning and the end of participation in the Safe Passage Project, measuring the quality of family functioning. In addition, we measure progress by: - High employee satisfaction and low turnover - Financial stability

Here are some of the results and progress we have made with families over the past year: 91% of children served are reported to have improved self-esteem and coping skills 87% of our parents report a reduction in conflict 85% of adults served report a decrease in day-to-day stress experienced 78% of our parents report an improvement in co-parenting skills Financial stability continues to be our primary goal yet to be reached.