by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The City is bringing dozens of its most effective community groups together in a campaign to offer comprehensive solutions to family problems.
The pilot program is a collaborative effort among the City, the State Department of Children and Families and business consulting firm Franklin Covey. Using a DCF grant, the Jacksonville Network for Strengthening Families seeks to train community groups in Covey’s 7 Habits of Successful Families. That training will be passed along to an initial class of 200 Jacksonville residents.
From illiteracy to drug and alcohol abuse to crime, most of society’s problems share a root cause: the breakdown of the family unit, said City Chief Community Officer Pete Jackson. Creating successful families could provide a fundamental fix to many of Jacksonville’s societal ills, he said.
“If you want to deal with problems like teen pregnancy or a lack of connection to schools, you need to deal with where those issues originate, and that’s the family,” said Jackson.
Jackson said the network resulted from a combination of hard work and providence. He carried the concept with him from the private sector to City Hall last July. When DCF came to the City shopping a $100,000 grant for a child-abuse prevention program the concept was already in place.
Just 30 days after the framework met with funding, the City and Franklin Covey hosted many of the community participants at the Osborn Center. Jackson said training for the organizations would begin in about a month.
The DCF grant — matched by $33,000 of City money — will also pay for a treatment database. It will track the effectiveness of the treatment network and will provide tangible data when organizers look for future public and private funding.