Skill Enhancement for Families
Building and Enhancing Personal Skills
Parent to Parent offers families the following skill enhancement and workshop opportunities to increase their capacity to assist their family member with a disability toward a desirable future. Families tell us that when they have the information and practical skills to articulate the needs of their son or daughter they can make more informed choices and decisions, and more effectively meet the challenges that may arise.
Our courses also compliment our succession planning, giving families the opportunity to reflect on how to negotiate more effectively.
PARENT TO PARENT OFFERS A NUMBER OF OPPORTUNITIES TO:
- Increase assertion, communication and problem solving skills when dealing with professionals
- Develop networks
- Develop circles of support and influence
- Plan and negotiate services for the best possible outcomes
- Be aware of up-to-date beliefs to increase understanding of jargon, the system and ideas of service practice
AND BELIEVE THAT:
- Parents’ are best supported by others who have had similar life experiences.
- Parents’ standing beside each other enables one another to increase their confidence and problem solving abilities and support each other to meet their daughters and sons needs.
- Modelling personal values and skills is a very powerful way for parents to increase their own and other parents personal strengths and resilience.
Family Facilitators.
Parent to Parent facilitators are parents who have a daughter or son with a disability. Family facilitators also draw upon their own life experiences, and share these experiences, in particular their successful strategies, as part of their facilitation role.Communication and Supporting Skills
A 16 hour course delivered over 4 or 8 sessions for families to build interpersonal skills and further develop personal strengths. The topics covered include:- Introduction to the concepts of Basic Communication and Supporting.
- Acceptance – facilitates the sharing of participant experiences
- Supporting – Explore the meaning and sources of support, and the factors that interfere with this.
- Listening – attentive; active and paraphrasing
- Developing assertion skills for successful and strategic meetings
- Advocacy
- Revision and integration of skills.
The lead trainer is a parent, in partnership with a professional or another parent. The professional has been chosen by the parent to assist with the course. The members of this partnership have together attended a 5-day live in training course. This course is delivered by parents in their local communities
The Five Valued Experiences
One-day workshop exploring the principles of the Five Valued Experiences:- Choosing
- Belonging
- Being respected
- Sharing ordinary places and
- Contributing.
Parent comments….this workshop gave me a real sense of how important it is for my child to have these experiences, so he can be seen as a valued person within his community.
Values and Language
One-day workshop that explores the negative and positive impact of the:- Conscious and unconscious values and assumptions.
- Language used about and for people with a disability.
- Importance of a positive image.
To Stand Beside - Advocacy for Inclusion
Three- day workshop. Empowering people, who support, assist or represent people with a disability. Aimed at:- Independent voluntary and paid advocates
- Disability service staff that have an indirect advocacy role, including program and residential workers, case managers and community workers.
- Parents, teachers and aides supporting educational inclusion for students with a disability.
- Special educators working to achieve inclusive outcomes
- Parents and self-advocates involved in advocacy on behalf of people with disability.
- Strong and effective advocacy
- Collaborative Team-Building
- Strategies for Successful Inclusion
Parent comments…I have a greater insight on Advocacy. I am clearer when and where to position myself when it comes to my son. When I need to be out in front, when my son’s needs are not being met; when I need to be beside him, supporting him in his decisions, and when I need to be behind him, so he knows I am supporting him in making his own decisions.
FACILITATING SELF MANAGEMENT
Parent to Parent offers opportunities for individuals to be accredited to facilitate courses in their own community. We recognise skills and abilities of parents, and support them to develop a role that they would like to play in their community or organisation. Many are natural leaders, although some of them initially would not have seen themselves as such. These parents are motivated to learn new skills and challenge themselves to gain new knowledge-because they want to make a difference, and make things easier for new parents.
Often they have never facilitated training and discover they are naturally good at it - why wouldn’t they be, it is really an extension of the role they play at home as a parent, and in particular as the parent of a person with a disability.
Train the Trainer in Communication and Supporting Skills
This five-day event is facilitated by two of the three the writers of the course. This includes Ray Murray, the former Associate Dean, Special Education, Auckland College of Education and Linda Davies a parent and teacher. Participants, both parents and professionals, report developing an understanding of each other’s perspective and a respect for each others roles. This workshop provides a team building and personal development environment, and participants end the week by doing a P.A.T.H to develop a personal vision of their partnership role.Family Facilitators
Family Facilitators are parents in Parent to Parent that are interested in facilitating workshops and training in the organisation. They are provided with a pathway to learn new skills or enhance their existing skills. All parent facilitators have completed the Train the Trainer in Communication and Supporting Skills and Certificate 1V in Workplace Training and Assessment.
Family Facilitators have a commitment to skill enhancement opportunities for both themselves, and to share with those families they come into contact with. Personal experiences and feedback from other families, has shown that an understanding of some of the up to date ideas about disability, sees families enhance their awareness of the consequences of their decisions on their family member with a disability. As well as to be more discerning in the choices they make. This also enables them to build their capacity to become more effective advocate’s, and to better manage the issues and challenges that can arise in day to day life.
PARENT TO PARENT IS HAPPY TO DEVELOP CUSTOMISED COURSES UPON REQUEST TO MEET FAMILY NEEDS.
Two Hour Workshop Series
Assisting families to enhance their skills for their own wellbeing, as well as to plan a vision and realise a desirable future for their family member with a disability, via a range of workshops and resources.THESE WORKSHOPS ARE DESIGNED TO PROVIDE FAMILIES WITH INFORMATION THAT IS RELEVANT, PRACTICAL AND USEFUL INCLUDING:
- Assertion-exploring ways to maintain respect, satisfy your needs and defend you rights, in a positive way.
- Confidentiality-what families need to know, and what they should expect from professionals.
- Listening skills-a session designed to give families practical ways to manage meetings with professionals.
- Gifts, Capacities and Strengths. Families exploring their daughter or sons skills rather than the deficits that others focus on.
- Workplace Health and Safety in your home – what families need to know if they have staff come into their home.
- Person Centred Planning-what this means, and how it can be an empowering tool for families.
- Values and Language – how what we say and do effects how others see people with a disability and their family.
- Family Strengths and values – exploring, acknowledging & building on the skills families have acquired as a parent of a person with a disability.
- Networking – looking at how families build networks to increase their information and influence in the interests of their family member with a disability.
Look under planning, to find 2 hour courses on using practical tools that specifically compliment the different kinds of plans we do. These are very useful in coaching the people that support our son or daughter.