The Relationship Cafe will serve the Miami area community with a mission to create a peaceful world by teaching our parents, children, and couples the life skills they need for more respectful relationships. Children ages five to seventeen, parents of children who have difficulty disciplining them, step-parents who are trying to co-parent with their divorced other, and couples without children trying to strengthen their bond as a family are the target group of the project. Currently, there are more than 34 thousand households in Monroe County of Miami alone, out of which almost 7 thousand are with children, and around 1.5 thousand live below poverty (Households/Income Data for County: Monroe, 2020). The issue of relational bonding as a family is especially important in the area due to its multicultural and diverse environment.
Several projects in the Miami area provide similar services to couples, parents, and children. However, they dismiss the issue of child-parent bonds from a relational standpoint. Organizations like the National Parenting Education Network, Parent to Parent Program Miami, Nurturing Parenting Program, and others act as promising sources both of funding and collaboration. These organizations, including those providing grants, such as Family Violence Prevention, promote social change and improvement projects. Although services for parents and children are available, new policies, practices, and programs should be introduced and developed to encourage and ensure healthy families (Teti et al., 2017). For instance, the child abuse rate in Miami-Dade County has decreased since 2011 because of approach transformation (Child Abuse Rate, 2020). Although the situation improved, the problem of family connectedness and trust remains in need of attention.
The Relationship Cafe will build connections and collaborate with similar organizations to keep the business sustainable. One of the key indicators for successful project implementation is gaining public support, especially the target group (Garcia et al., 2018). Personal experience and communication both in private practice and psychiatric hospital domains have shown that people tend to feel disconnected from their families, their significant other, their children, their friends, and their parents. Through collaboration with other organizations interested in improving households’ and families’ well-being, the Relationship Cafe will address the child-parent relationship issue that is often ignored.
References
Child Abuse Rate. (2020). Miami Matters.
Garcia, K. M., Martin, E., Garney, W. R., & Primm, K. M. (2018). Qualitative analysis of partnerships’ effect on implementation of a nationally led community-based initiative. Health Promotion Practice, 19(5), 775–783. Web.
Households/Income Data for County: Monroe. (2020). Miami Matters.
Teti, D. M., Cole, P. M., Cabrera, N., Goodman, S. H., & McLoyd, V. C. (2017). Supporting parents: How six decades of parenting research can inform policy and best practice. Society for Research in Child Development, 30(5), 1-34.