Healthy Start/Healthy Families program gets a boost for Fatherhood Initiative

St. Joseph Mercy Oakland’s (SJMO) Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland program has been awarded a $25,000 capacity-building grant from the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) through the National Responsible Fatherhood Capacity Building Initiative (NRFCBI). Funds from the grant will allow Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland to better serve fathers through existing and future programs.

Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland is an award-winning, fully credentialed collaborative program that provides home visitation services for vulnerable families with infants and young children in Oakland County. SJMO provides these services to promote healthy child growth and development and strengthen families.

Among the Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland fatherhood initiatives is Conscious Fathering, a three-hour workshop that engages new or expectant fathers in the pre-natal stage and teaches them how to properly care for an infant from birth to three months of age. The focus of the program is to improve birth outcomes and promote child health and well-being. Fathers of young children conduct the workshop.

Through a competitive process that generated more than 400 applications, Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland was one of 26 organizations chosen from across the country to receive a capacity-building grant. The grant will allow Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland to increase its capacity to develop fatherhood programming and improve its financial sustainability by become more familiar with—and better qualified to receive—federal or private philanthropic support.

Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland, along with the 25 other 2011 Capacity Building grantees will attend an intensive, weeklong “Certification College,” led by fatherhood experts from NFI who will help grantees cultivate “promising practices” in their leadership development, organizational structure, programming trends and community connections.

Throughout the year, awardees will receive follow-up technical assistance from NFI, including phone consultations, email follow-up, occasional Web-based seminars and other resources. Finally, the grantees will participate in a two-day mini-conference, including assessment and evaluation, that will measure their improvement over the course of the grant period.

“NFI is honored to be able to support Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland and other organizations across the country as they strive to develop more effective solutions for the fathers in the communities,” said Roland C. Warren, President of NFI. “At a time when one in three children are growing up apart from their fathers, Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland should be applauded for its efforts to engage Oakland County’s fathers in the lives of their children”

Jack Weiner, SJMO President and CEO, said the grant “will help Healthy Start/Healthy Families Oakland give young fathers the tools they need to develop positive and nurturing relationships within their families so that their children can have a healthy beginning and a healthy future.”

The NRFCBI is a program administered by the NFI through a cooperative agreement with he U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance. This year’s grantees are the fifth set of about 15 grantees per year that have been assisted by the NRFCBI since 2007. For more information about NRFCBI, visit capacitybuilding.fatherhood.org.