This course will focus on preparing students to work with families in a community context. Central themes of the course include strategies for family and community engagement, understanding how families interact with community organizations and institutions, how to mobilize family and community assets, and collaborating with families to create systems change and build positive community resources. The course will pose questions for students about the roles of family professionals in supporting families in community contexts. The course will utilize readings about best practices in family and community engagement, both from the family studies literature and from cutting edge community-based organizations. Students will participate in a community project with a community organization that focuses on supporting families. This will enable them to attend community meetings, shadow family/community liaisons, and better understand the interface between families, community organizations, and institutions. Class assignments will allow students to engage in reflective practice and pull learning from their community-based experiences. They will learn concrete skills like meeting facilitation through a workshop format.

Connections between policies that governments enact, and families and their well-being. Conceptual frameworks for influences underlying policy choices. Evaluating consequences of such choices for diverse families.

This course will focus on stress contexts that place families at risk across the life span such as poverty, war/civil conflict, disability, social disparities/discrimination, and family dissolution. An examination of family strengths, cultural diversity, and approaches for working with families across the life course in community based settings including classrooms, programs, and agencies will be emphasized. This course focuses on vulnerable families and those affected by historical and traumatic stress. It covers family members of all ages who face particular challenges, such as intergenerational exposure to traumatic events, persistent and structural inequality, and health disparities. This course is designed to increase awareness of the conditions that place families and children at risk, the theories and frameworks available to understand these risks, and both individual and family resiliency to these conditions. The course will primarily focus on a) individual, family, community, and developmental contexts of risk and resiliency, and b) family-level preventive and intervention frameworks and approaches to support individuals and families.

This course focuses on the impact of “immigration” (i.e., refugee vs. various types of immigration statuses) on family relationships, specifically how culture of origin and acculturation processes influence individuals and families over time; explores issues faced by various immigrant family systems, including a consideration of generational status, gender identities, social classes, and ethnic/racial group identities; develops intercultural interaction skills that prepare students to effectively engage with diverse immigrant families in multiple contexts; and builds practical skills that enhance students’ abilities to work in and collaborate with community-and faith-based organizations to strengthen cultural resources while overcoming barriers to increase service utilization.