Keep Hope Alive for Single Black Mothers

At Pointters Community Initiatives, our efforts to help keep hope alive for single black mothers in our community has to go beyond simply providing resources. Many single black mothers struggle to deal with the mental stress of having to raise children by themselves, and it can prove especially challenging of the family has communication issues, such as children snapping back at their parent or the parent unsure of how to properly discipline their child.

As part of our efforts to strengthen family bonds and to help single black mothers in raising their families, PCI is set to begin our presentation of the Strengthening Families Program, a multi-week initiatives in which trainers like the staff at PCI work with families to offer them insightful ways to improve communication and reduce stress amongst family members, leading to happier families and stronger bonds, reducing the risk of suicide and drug use among family members, including the single mothers.

PCI spent several weeks of virtual training, reviewing the content provided by the SFP program to learn all of the recommended ways of improved communication, discipline, and family activities proven to improve family bonds and were given virtual instruction on how to present the material and handouts provided by a trained SFP staff member. The staff of PCI are now officially certified to teach SFP course material.

SFP has gained the attention of many families in the community currently, and PCI plans to have their orientation for the program begin on the last Thursday of January. PCI is eager to bring SFP to the families of the Fox Valley community, especially for those with a single black mother trying to be the caretaker. As the program continues, PCI hopes to reach more families as they make SFP a regular thing, but for now PCI is committed to ensuring they deliver the best variation of the program as possible to deliver to single black mothers and keep their hopes for their family alive.

Links:

• Our main website

Over the past month, HERS has undergone a significant evolution, which saw new successes in outreach towards minority women in our area as well as solve a significant problem when it came to scheduling with our current members.

Majority of the women that attend HERS are Congolese refugee women, and many of them have children of their own, ranging from newborns to teenagers. For these women, they often struggle to find people to care for their children while they have an errand to run, due to a variety of factors. For starters, the husbands are usually working odd hours to provide for the families and there is a general lack of knowledge and trust towards babysitting or daycare services that these women can take their children to, and that is if they can even afford said service. As such, many women were unable to attend previous HERS group meetings due to needing to take of their children.

For our latest meeting, we offered a compromise...we decided to host our seperate Youth Creative Mental Health Workshop at the same time as our HERS Group, with the intention being to allow the children to engage in fun creative activities in a seperate room while their mothers would attend the HERS Group next door.

This strategy proved fruitful for HERS Group, as our turnout increased at a higher rate compared to our previous HERS Group meetings. We had in attendance roughly 20 families during this meeting. We also were able to accomplish our secondary objective of providing mental health support for youths and creative activities for them to relieve any stress they may have.

Of course, through this experimental meeting, we learned some helpful lessons to consider for future meetings. In particular, we found that putting a bunch of kids in different age groups all in one room created a perfect storm of chaos and uncertainty, so for future meetings efforts will need to be made to seperate some of the age groups to a seperate additional room to do a seperate creative workshop.

On top of that, we had an issue with the distribution of diapers towards our mothers, many who were in need for diapers of a particular size...one in which we ran out of in a quick matter. This reminds us of how we need to ensure we are stocked up on enough diaper supplies of important supplies.

With these lessons in mind, we hope to continue to polish up HERS to grow as a sustainable source of support for black refugee mothers, in regards to their emotional support, their diaper resources, and now the care for their children during HERS group meetings.

Links:

• Our website