CURRENT PROJECTS

The Parent Empowerment Program (PEP)

The main goal of this program is to train and prepare parent advocates - i.e., professional parents, often parents of children with mental illness - whose task is to help parents of children with mental illness gain access to services and develop effective relationships with mental health providers or teachers.

In various NIMH grant-supported programs developed in collaboration with Columbia researcher Kimberly Hoagwood, Ph.D., parent advocates are provided initial face-to-face training in an intensive 40-hour period, where they learn about the range of mental health problems experienced by children and youth, efficacious interventions, and optimal methods for assisting parents who are new to "the system" in learning how to effectively advocate for their own children and to get them the help they need.

Different types of Parent Empowerment Programs have now been developed to prepare parent advocates to assist parents in different settings, such as primary care and mental health settings, child welfare, school, and juvenile justice. 

All of these programs are based on the solid premise that our current health care and educational systems often do not provide adequate support to parents of a child with a mental health problem.  Instead, parents are often left to fend for themselves in the difficult task of learning how to get all the various parts of the health care and educational system.  Moreover, some parents and families have actually been traumatized by these systems in their experiences to date, making it difficult for them to trust the system.  But with the support of parent advocates who can serve as an effective broker and role model for these parents in how to get their child's needs met, these past difficult experiences can often be overcome, helping these parents obtain much needed, more effective and appropriate care for their children.

For more information on the REACH's Parent Empowerment Programs, contact REACH PEP Training Director Lisa Hunter Romanelli, Ph.D., at email peptraining@thereachinstitute.org