#RichlandGives Spotlight: Parent Aide
Imagine being a small child and due to family circumstances beyond your control, you are taken from your family and put in another home. By the time you enter High School you have been moved seven times and end up dropping out of school. As a young adult, what is your foundation? Who do you trust? Where do you call home and how do you make a home? For one young mother, this was her reality. When she met her Parent Aide mentor, she had lots of reasons to be skeptical, to hesitate and refuse to trust. During the 9 months that she worked hard in the program, she met weekly to cover parent education; she had the mentoring support that connected her to resources in the community that assisted her in obtaining her high school diploma, completing a factory job program, and obtaining her driver’s license! In less than a year, this mom transformed her life from one that felt like a series of struggles and failure, to one that expresses hope and achievement. This mom feels empowered and now has more skills and tools to assist her with creating stability and making her house a home for her children to build their foundation.
The Parent Aide Program has been providing supportive services to Richland County families since June 25, 1995. Parent Aides travel all over the county to provide in-home mentoring services and teach positive parenting education. This program has proven results and empowers parents in ways that have a meaningful impact on the lives of children and their families. While we celebrate how much we have grown and the number of families that we have served in 22 years, our program continues to evolve and envision what we can do in the next 20 years to prevent child maltreatment. We strive to continue building strong healthy families that have the skills needed to provide safe, stable, nurturing environments from childhood to adulthood, better equipped to manage future challenges!
Richland Gives has become an integral part of our community outreach, providing us with the opportunity to share our mission and partner with new community members. Richland Gives provides a platform for our small program to have a VOICE in the community to tell our story and brings us all together in our common goal of enriching the lives of everyone in our neighborhoods, young or old. Donors investing in our prevention mission enabled us to receive additional dollars in matching funds that help us to serve more families and reduce our waiting list by being able to provide direct service to additional families. We invite you to be part of a program that invests in the lives of children!
