The principles at the core of community development are:

•    social justice
•    self-determination
•    working and learning together
•    sustainable communities
•    participation
•    reflective practice

This is how we put this into practice in our Resilient Parent Project

Social justice
The project was initiated because we recognised that processes in local child & family services were focusing almost exclusively on the needs of the child.  We recognised that in many situations, things were unlikely to change for children if parents’ own need for support and care were met.
Unwittingly, by ignoring parents’ needs, professionals enter a frustrating cycle of interventions for children which never quite work because the whole family perspective is not accounted for. A subtle undercurrent of seeing parents as the problem develops, with no real effort to see the parents’ own needs as a priority in order to empower them to bring up their own family.
We decided to focus on the parents, to give them the chance to get direct support, attention and opportunities.


Self-determination
When families are involved with statutory services it can be challenging for professionals to work in ways in which parents take stock of their own needs.  We designed a parent coaching model in order to ensure that parents are in the driving seat from the outset. They identify which areas of their lives have strengths and which areas of their lives they want to progress.
We have found that where parents are referred by social services, some comply simply because they believe this will show social workers or others that they no longer need statutory intervention.  However, some do develop trust that the coaching process is built on the parent’s own agenda. When this happens, the parent starts to consider how they can strengthen themselves. Over time, and with increasing trust in the relationship with the coach, parents talk less about their problem with their child and more about how they can address the problems in their own lives that they can see are affecting their family life.

Working and learning together
Coaching is a process in which the person being coached, and the coach, are learning together the unique experiences and perspectives, and therefore the unique solutions, to the person’s situations. It is a partnership and cannot work if the coach tries to impose “expert” knowledge or ideas - the person being coached is the expert in their own life.
We are now hoping to experiment with developing peer to peer coaching between parents so that parents themselves help each other to learn and find solutions together.

Sustainable communities
Many of the parents we worked with in the Resilient Parent project felt isolated from their communities and stigmatised by the problems they were having with their children. This affected their sense of belonging to their communities, their ability to form relationships with other parents, and their willingness to seek help from professionals who they felt judged by.
Many of the parents we worked with gradually became more personally resilient by engaging in different kinds of community activities and becoming more able to find fulfilling activities which provided social connections and a sense of learning and development.

Participation
Parents were encouraged from the outset to see their participation in the Resilient Parent project as a choice, regardless of whether they were referred to the project by other agencies.  Some parents have been involved in the project on an intermittent basis, working with coaches for a period of time, then re-engaging at a later stage when they want to focus on new areas of their lives. The most vulnerable parents have used the helping relationship with the coach in different ways at different stages of their personal journey.

Reflective practice
Whilst developing the project we found the conceptualisation of “helping relationships” developed by the Centre for Child and Parent Support at Guys Hospital interesting  Family Partnership Model, in ‘How Helping Works, towards a shared model of process’ (2006) with One Plus One and Parentline Plus.
We also looked at John Heron’s Model of helping styles.
Coaching is not new, it is a tried and tested approach used in many different contexts. What we did in this project was consider what parents may need and how we could develop and adapt a coaching framework in partnership with them.