<p>Darrin Johnson:<br />Family Focus is a family support organization that was founded in 1976 by our founder, Dr. Bernice Weissbourd. The Family Focus divides its services into three buckets. One is family support, and that's going to include something like an Illinois welcoming center, where we work closely with immigrants and refugees, connecting them with needed resources in the community. Our others afterschool programs, working closely with parents, teachers, and administrators to provide and to enhance and support curriculums to ensure that students are getting the most out of their education, supporting them through extracurricular activities and STEM activities and homework help and mentoring. And then our other bucket of services early childhood, which is really the foundation upon which Family Focus was established in 1976. We provide early childhood programs, which as I mentioned, we started in 1976. That was really the genesis and the sort of brain child that Dr. Bernice Weissbourd had for starting Family Focus was to work with children zero to three because we know those are the formative years for children, specifically when it comes to brain development.<br /><br />Darrin Johnson:<br />We also have a very robust immigration services program where we, again, working with immigrants and refugees, connecting them again with services and any type of documentation and things that they need to become citizens and any other services that they need connecting them with benefits. Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs that you will ever do. There's no instruction manual that's given to you when you leave the hospital with your newborn. And so Family Focus wants to be that conduit for families. So we really adopt a strength based approach. That's really sort of the bread and butter of the work that we do with families. So we're going to literally sit with the family during the intake process.<br /><br />Darrin Johnson:<br />And as we're filling out paperwork, we're going to ask them what are the strengths that they already bring to the table? And sometimes it's difficult for families because as you said, there's a stigma that's often attached to being a good parent or a bad parent. And we work with them very closely. We provide, we try to establish trust in the very beginning. We have nine family support principles that really undergird the work that we do with families and one of those principles is mutual respect and equality. And so we work closely again with families to really pull out those strengths, those sometimes hidden strengths that they are not even aware of, that they already possess, that enable them to be the great parents that they are. We have a robust evaluation and monitoring process that we implement with all of our programs. And so we're tracking their progress from the start of say a parenting class until they graduate.<br /><br />Darrin Johnson:<br />And so we will administer a pre-test and a post-test. So we'll get an initial baseline look at where they are with their knowledge of parenting skills. And then we're certainly looking for a certain benchmark by the time they graduate with that post-test and we'll measure the results, where we need to strengthen our curriculum or add other activities if the benchmarks are not necessarily being hit at a particular time. Sometimes a parent may go through a parenting class a second time. Sometimes voluntarily. They say they enjoyed it so much they may come back and serve as a mentor for future parents. But other parents may say this was really great information, but I want to take the class again just to make sure that I'm really adept at the learning that was provided.</p>