Family Preservation

The Administration for Native Americans (ANA), within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), created the Family Preservation Initiative to promote culturally suitable strategies that strengthen Native American communities.

The goal of the Family Preservation Initiative is to increase the well-being of children through family preservation activities; increase the percentage of children raised in healthy family environments; increase public awareness in communities about the value of healthy families, relationships, marriages, and responsible fatherhood; ensure that relationship, marriage, fatherhood, and family services are traditionally and culturally appropriate; increase the percentage of involvement by absentee parents in the lives of their children; foster healthy relationships, marriages, families and responsible fathers; and increase the percentage of Native homes that are free from domestic violence and abuse against children.

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is focused on strengthening children, families and communities.  Below is a list of the overall program areas for the Family Preservation Special Initiative.

Pre-Marital and Marital Education

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is focused on helping adults learn skills to assist in developing healthy relationships and marriages including conflict resolution, respect, trust, commitment, and communication.  Under ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative, Native communities can provide pre-marital and marital education services to teach relationship skills, parenting skills, and marital skills to individuals, married and unmarried couples, and parents. 

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is focused on helping grandparents raising grandchildren.  Some Indian tribes estimate up to 60 percent of children are being raised by their grandparents.  Grandparents provide a stable family and instill traditional cultural values and customs in the home. A strong sense of cultural identity greatly impacts the children’s ability to overcome the challenges they will meet as adults.  Grandparents raising grandchildren in Native communities often lack support and access to resources.  Through ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative, Native communities can develop projects to provide grandparents with greater support services and access to resources.   

Relationship Skills for Youth

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is focused on helping youth develop positive relationships within their families and communities.  Organizations have the opportunity to provide youth healthy relationship skills education through high schools, youth organizations, and community centers to teach the value of healthy relationships, responsible fatherhood, and family preservation.  In these settings, youth will gain the skills necessary to form positive and healthy relationships that strengthen families and communities.  Healthy relationship skills education includes conflict resolution, communication, commitment, and responsible parenting.  

Family Violence

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is committed to supporting projects that strive to reduce child abuse and neglect, as well as decrease family domestic violence in communities.  All Family Preservation grantees providing services focused on healthy marriages, relationships and responsible fatherhood are required to develop a domestic violence protocol to utilize throughout the grant award to ensure all survivors of domestic violence are responded to appropriately.

Parenting

ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative is focused on supporting projects that provide assistance to parents in a culturally appropriate manner.  Recipients of this assistance can be single parents, foster parents, or absentee parents.  Under ANA’s Family Preservation Initiative, Native American communities can apply for funding for a multitude of family strengthening projects. 

Theses projects include:

• Recruit, train and certify new foster parents or promote appropriate extended family placements;
• Provide services to absentee parents to help them overcome barriers that prevent them from consistent involvement in their children’s lives;
• Provide education on communication and conflict resolution to improve the custodial and non-custodial parental relationships;
• Promote the value and importance of healthy families;
• Provide services to fathers to help them overcome barriers to positive involvement in their children’s lives;
• Provide education and activities focused on responsible fatherhood and parenting; and
• Provide family strengthening services to individuals with substance abuse issues as a way to support a strong healthy family environment.