FAMILY RESOURCE NAVIGATORS

Family Resource Navigators (FRN) is a parent-staffed and parent-led agency serving families of children with developmental delays, social emotional concerns and disabilities in Alameda County.Our mission is to support families of children with special needs in Alameda County and empower them to access and improve systems that serve children.

FRN has three main strategies -- one on one peer family navigation, trainings/groups for support, and parent leadership, One on one peer family navigation means that all staff are family members with experiential and learned knowledge about systems and advocacy. They coach and support family members to connect to and advocate for services. This can be a phone call or two, or may take place over a matter of months. Family Navigators stay with a family until a child is connected to services, or the family thinks they can handle on their own.

Trainings and group activities offer a mixture of learning and social support activities for parents and family members, allowing them to connect with each other and form natural social supports. Parents from FRN's leadership programs organize and facilitate most group activities. FRN offers leadership trainings in system change, advocacy and being a peer parent.

FRN Parent leadership offers opportunities for family members to become system advocates. FRN offer opportunities for parents to change the systems that serve families -- or be a community leader that helps families. FRN trainings between 20-50 family leaders each year focusing on family members who are bi-cultural and bi-lingual. Some of these family leaders then join FRN's governing board or staff. This strategy has helped FRN build a very diverse workforce, the agency current is able to help families in 12 different languages.

FRN staff are well equipped to meet these goals. FRN is a parent directed and parent led agency, we are the families that we serve. Staff have been system advocates, parent leaders, support group leaders themselves. Staff have also had to advocate for their own children. FRN adds to this rich experiential knowledge through extensive training for staff in all systems that serve children with developmental delays and disabilities. Staff attend a minimum of 5 trainings per year on working with families and the way systems work. New staff attend a 20 session training class that goes through all the agencies/services that work with our families. Furthermore, all staff are trained in the Strengthening Families approach -- and work on building resilience and capacity in the families we serve.

FRN staff work with about 2000 families in any given year. Last year, FRN had 1,833 face-to-face meetings with families; 15,221 exchanges with families by text, phone or email and 3,167 calls to therapists, agencies and schools for a family. Last year -- FRN staff helped families get connected to school district services (over 650), get advocacy training (almost 1000), find subsidized child care (over 100), enroll in Medi-Cal (over 80) and get help taking care of their child at home from In Home Supportive Services (over 100) -- to name a few. More importantly, in surveys families tell us that FRN staff are respectful of their culture (100%), helped them become more knowledgeable about systems (92%) and become better advocates for their children and families (95%).