WUNRN
PROMISING FUTURES: BEST PRACTICES FOR SERVING CHILDREN, YOUTH, & PARENTS EXPERIENCING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Welcome to the Promising Futures website! We hope that you find this a useful resource for helping you transform or enhance your program’s ability to effectively meet the needs of women, children and youth experiencing domestic violence**. Given DV programs are constantly facing funding cuts and are under pressure to demonstrate positive outcomes, it is essential that we are strategic about prioritizing effective interventions that are trauma informed, developmentally and culturally relevant, and strengthen the mother-child relationship. Furthermore, as a field, we are at a pivotal moment in our movement history where we need to consider how partnering with researchers and documenting our successes can assist in advancing the field and securing essential resources.
Whether you are just starting to explore how your program’s
policies could better reflect an equal commitment to mothers and children, or
you have been delivering holistic services for all family members for years,
this website has information and tools that can help you advance your practice.
The website is organized around five major topics:
- Get the Facts:
includes general information and statistics about the effects of domestic
violence on children, parenting, and outlines some guiding principles for
enhancing our services for children and youth.
- Program
Readiness: is designed to assist programs in
revisiting their infrastructure, physical environment, policies and
practices to better support the mother-child relationship and
institutionalize the notion that our advocacy for mothers and kids should
be connected in every way.
- Interventions for Children and Youth:
includes searchable database of promising practices and evidence based
clinical interventions for children and youth to help programs promote
healing and resilience among mothers and children together. This section
also includes some resources and information on working with special
populations, and adaptation and evaluation of programs.
- Advancing
the Field: discusses how advocates can be more
intentional about implementing research informed practice including trauma
informed strategies and partnering with researchers to document our
success. This section also contains, Communities
in Action which highlights innovative leaders in the
field who are working on implementing new and enhancing existing
interventions and policies to better serve children and youth within their
programs.
- Tools: includes a multitude of
resources to assist programs in capacity building including training
curriculum, resources for families, and tools for research and evaluation.
http://promising.futureswithoutviolence.org/tools/browse-by-topic/
We envisioned this website as an evolving resource for advocates and programs so please share with us all of the innovative work and tools you have developed so that we can continue to highlight the work of the field. This website is for you, so please let us know how we can support and advance your practice.
**Regarding the use of gendered pronouns throughout this website–we acknowledge that both women and men can be victims of domestic violence, but research suggests that women are more often victims and suffer more serious injury and death than men1,2,3. Both men and women can be violent in same-sex couples, and a man can be abused by a female partner. However, the majority of domestic violence situations involve a man being abusive with a female partner and for this reason, we use female pro-nouns to reference victims of domestic violence and male pro-nouns when referencing the abuser.1,2,3