The goal of Community Engaged Parent Education is to develop the capacity of parents for citizen deliberation and action on public issues related to children's well being.  We will accomplish this goal through two principal means: by training a network of parent educators currently working with Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) programs, and by developing a network of parent leaders who will organize other parents for civic engagement. Our long-term mission is to influence the profession of parent education to integrate the public dimension of parenting into everyday parent education.  The Community Engaged Parent Education Project is a funding partnership between the McKnight Foundation and the University of Minnesota.

      Over the past five years, Bill Doherty of the University of Minnesota and a group of parent educators led by Beth Cutting of St. Paul ECFE have developed and refined the skills of Community Engaged Parent Education and are now prepared to bring it from the pilot stage to the mainstream stage in Early Childhood Family Education throughout Minnesota. Our vision is that parent education, while maintaining its traditional mission of educating parents about child development and the personal side of parenting, will also be a vehicle for civic conversations and citizen development that will renew and strengthen family life.

     The key principle in Community Engaged Parent Education is that all personal parenting concerns, without exception, have public dimensions.  The key skills are to weave the public dimensions of parenting seamlessly into the discussion of personal parenting concerns, and to facilitate personal and collective action on issues that are of great concern to parents.  We have found parents eager to engage with public issues when they see them as clearly related to their children’s well being.  In one instance, a Community Engaged Parent Education-trained educator facilitated a classroom conversation that began with a mother’s concern about her child’s aggressive behavior.  In addition to helping this mother with her personal concern, the group expanded the horizon of the problem to include the influences of media violence and hyper-aggressive video games targeted to young children.

      In most cases, Community Engaged Parent Education focuses on this kind of expanded consciousness among parents in the classroom.  Sometimes these conversations lead to personal or collective action by parents.  During one discussion of aggressive behavior and media violence, one parent noted that the local community recreation center had violent video games.  With the encouragement of the parent educator, the parents decided to organize and eventually got the video games replaced.  Currently there are few venues like this for parents to reflect and sometimes act on community influences on parents and children, few professionals who are equipped to assist in this process, and hardly any pathways for parents who find their voices as citizens to organize with other parents across the community. This project aims to fill these gaps. 

     We have learned that disseminating Community Engaged Parent Education skills requires small group learning and face-to-face mentoring. This is a professional growth step for experienced parent educators. It is necessary to internalize the skills of questioning and incorporating the community dimension into parenting discussions. There are no short cuts in this work. That is why we are asking for a two-year commitment to professional growth.