This week’s Friday Field Notes will take a look at the OneOp Family Development (FD) team’s resources for helping families through disasters. The FD team focuses on family strengthening and the prevention and treatment of family violence. With a focus on prevention, the FD team has fantastic resources for service providers and families to increase their awareness and knowledge of disaster preparedness from a holistic perspective that includes family members of all ages.
The Kids Serve Too! webinar series was a collaborative effort among Family Development, Network Literacy, and Family Transitions. The second event in the webinar series, “Safe and Sound: Caring in Our Community” was hosted by Family development with an emphasis on children and communities. Presenters, Antonio Freitas and Sabrina Huda, from the Sesame Street Workshop discussed ways that disturbing events can affect children as well as strategies for coping and self-care in the aftermath of an event.
Additionally, the Resilience Series is a great source of information for service providers working with couples and families with or without children. Once again, the series was a collaborative effort with other OneOp concentration areas and FD hosted the second event, “Nurturing Family Resilience Through a Strengths-Based Framework,” presented by Dr. Froma Walsh. Viewing the webinar and its associated resources will help service providers identify strengths in families that assist in coping after trauma as well as the positive outcomes of stress, like deeper bonds with family members and a greater ability to overcome future challenges.
Going beyond MFLN, there are many additional resources for family preparedness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a helpful infographic to help families prepare for disasters, emphasizing how each family is unique, therefore, each emergency plan should be unique as well. Military.com also has helpful information for military families living in the US or abroad, and how each move warrants changes to the family’s unique emergency plan.
You can learn more about the OneOp Family Development team by catching up on their webinars, podcast episodes, and timely blog posts. The FD team has some exciting programming coming up in 2020 and you do not want to miss out! Stay informed by following them on Twitter and signing up for their mailing list!
