Our Programs

Strengthening Families Responsible Parenting Program

Our Strengthening Families program is funded by Children’s Trust Fund and Alabama State Department of Human Resources. The program is focused on strengthen families by providing parenting classes, workshops, case management, by focusing on strengthening and establishing high quality, emotionally supportive parent-child relationships. Parents are supported by Parent Coaches who help them to identify a career pathway which improves their employment opportunities, helping to stabilize their family through the increased financial income, ensuring regular payment of child support and other financial support for their children.

Our focus is on teaching parents how to coparent effectively and how to maintain a healthy parent relationship. The target population for our program: custodial and non-custodial fathers and mothers who are underemployed or unemployed, who may lack a high school diploma or GED, they also may lack the skills or the knowledge to obtain gainful career employment.

We accomplish these goals by providing parent coaches to parents. Coaches help guide parents through programs that will help them gain employment skills and the needed certification, to find suitable employment.

Our coaches assist parents in the development of family plans that address their hopes, wants, and wishes for their family. Including employment goals, educational goals, housing, transportation, and how to overcome obstacles, handle setbacks, legal issues, illness, and other problematic situations.    

Funding prevention work has the potential to reduce not only the social, emotional, and achievement costs to our youth and families, but also to reduce the real financial costs associated with intervention.

E-mail [email protected] to register for programs:

Positive Parenting Classes

Positive Parenting and Nurturing Parenting education classes built on the premise that maltreatment of children can be treated and prevented through a systematic application of family-based parenting classes. The classes are designed to replace old, unwanted, and hurtful patterns of parenting with newer, healthier patterns of bonding and attachment; displaying empathy and positively responding to the needs of their children; discipline that maintains the dignity of children; self-awareness and enlightenment of the adult’s own personal childhood; and a sense of empowerment to make good choices that promote personal and community health. With this program we identify nine primary goals for our participants to work on.
These goals are:

1. Empowering parents to understand how to meet their children’s needs for health and safety.
2. Making parents aware of when their emotions interfere with their abilities to parent effectively.
3. Equipping parents with the knowledge to employ non-violent methods of stress and anger management.
4. Ensuring that parents are knowledgeable about how to create a safe home environment.
5. Enabling parents to understand the effects of alcohol, smoking, substance on families.
6. Training parents on initiating self-care and ensuring and maintaining emotional wellbeing.
7. Equipping parents to understand the dynamics of physical, emotional, and domestic violence.
8. Teaching parents to understand the effects of domestic violence, both physical and emotional, on their children.
9. Empowering parents to manage their children’s behavior in a nurturing and effective manner.

FREE Positive Parenting Classes! Completion certificates provided after 8 classes attended.

E-mail [email protected] to register for classes. 

Funded by Alabama Children’s Trust Fund & Community Foundation of South Alabama 

A-RESET

Our workforce development program assists SNAP and TANF-eligible participants, in gaining the necessary skills and work experience to help them find careers in high-demand and high-wage fields. Participants receive direct case management and concrete support to assist with economic barriers.

Supervised Visitation

Many parents are court ordered to have supervised visitation with their children. Our centers provide welcoming and home-like atmospheres where parents and children can visit each other.

Funded by Alabama Children’s Trust Fund, Alabama Office of the Court and United Way of Baldwin County.

Monitored Exchanges

Monitored Exchanges are funded by the Children’s Trust Fund. In 2006 we began offering a service formerly performed by the Mobile Police Department. When exchanging children for weekend or holiday visitations, parents can now come to the Family Center and avoid contact per restraining orders.

Healthy Start – Never Shake a Baby

This prevention program deals directly with one of the most serious forms of child abuse in children: Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). The Family Center was asked by the Alabama Department of Public Health’s Child Death Review Team to develop a hospital-based prevention program in 2002.