News From ACT in the Communities October 2004 Highlights

Hello! We are proud of the progress we have made with the ACT Against Violence program. Thanks to the support, commitment, and hard work on the part of many people, the ACT National Training program has reached more than 500 professionals and thousands of parents and teachers of young children all over the country. The following are highlights from ACT in the communities and those who make it a reality!

Ann Heiss Schulte, LCSW
Family Advocacy Program Manager
Fort Eustis, VA

Hampton Roads, Virginia ACT in ACTion!

ACT continues to grow and thrive in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The Hampton Roads ACT initiative is living proof that a community need not wait for a sponsoring agency to emerge or the big grant to come through before getting ACT up and running! Three agencies—Newport News Healthy Families Initiative (Newport News Department of Social Services), Family Focus (Mary Immaculate Hospital Foundation), and Fort Eustis Army Community Service—Family Advocacy Program—serve as ACT co-sponsors. Together they have sponsored community facilitator training, program marketing and coordination of training requests to meet the myriad requests of parents, child care providers, teachers, and community groups wanting to sponsor or attend ACT training.

William Goodwin and Aditi Dutt, both Certified ACT Trainers, recently trained 19 more Community Facilitators, bringing the total to more than 50 local community professionals trained in the ACT model. One trainee’s comments reflected the responses of many: “It was helpful to see each module in action. It was easy to understand, the objectives were clearly stated and the flexibility of the approach was most useful for me.” Trainees agreed that their training certificates will be contingent upon presenting at least one ACT class for their own agency or a community group.

Many community professionals integrate ACT materials into their daily work—New Parent Support home visits, parent education, training child care staff, etc. In addition, local ACT programs scheduled for fall include a 5-week ACT series sponsored by Family Focus and a Media Violence workshop sponsored by the local Cooperative Extension agency.

Newport News Healthy Families’ ACT Program

In August, 19 new ACT Facilitators were trained. There was no cost for the training. However, each person is required to conduct 1 ACT Workshop from any 1 of the 4 modules they choose, before receiving their certificate. Once a copy of the class roster and the evaluation form is received, the Facilitator is mailed their certificate. Thus far, there have been 2 Facilitators that have completed the requirements.

For the past 10 months, ACT workshops have been provided twice per month for Employment Services participants at the Department of Social Services. The newly trained Facilitators will be used to continue providing free ACT workshops. This will allow them to meet the training requirement to receive their certificate.

Tasha R. Howe, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Humboldt State University
1 Harpst Street
Arcata, CA 95521

Humboldt Violence Free Families Project

The Humboldt Violence Free Families Project directed by Dr. Tasha R. Howe from the Psychology Dept. of Humboldt State University received about $5,000 from the university to provide free ACT trainings to professionals in Humboldt County, California, which is a rural, isolated, and economically depressed area. It was advertised widely across all helping professions and ended up recruiting about 55 people for three 2-day long sessions. The participants included police officers, juvenile diversion officers, social workers, nurses, school psychologists, preschool teachers, Head Start personnel, domestic violence and rape crisis workers, and community college faculty, among others. The response has been uniformly positive.

Dr. Howe collected pre and post test data and are doing 3 month follow-ups to see if the train-the-trainers model is working. Dr. Howe also created some content-related measures to assess whether trainees actually learned the ACT content and will do this in 3-month follow-up as well. Dr. Howe's graduate student in the Marriage and Family Therapy program (Jessica Miguel) will be doing the preliminary data analysis as part of her master's thesis and a proposal for this presentation has been sent to the Society for Research in Child Development. They continue to design program evaluation elements and will hopefully obtain a larger grant. Dr. Howe also had 8 undergraduate and graduate students attend the training and has formed a violence prevention lab at HSU where students can design their own small research projects, can assist professionals in their own ACT trainings, and can review literature on violence prevention.

Joyce Brown
Palos Verdes Estates, CA

Joyce Brown is conducting workshops and trainings through a variety of organizations and has recently incorporated ACT into two community groups who conduct parenting programs throughout the year. The most significant progress has been participating in a project with the South Bay Center for Counseling in El Segundo. The center operates with two large grants from California First Five and LA First Five and is conducting a School Readiness Program concentrating on four at risk schools in the Los Angeles area. Due to the largely Hispanic population, bilingual facilitators have been trained to conduct the workshops. Last spring, ACT was presented in a series of four workshops at each school. This year an additional four weeks of support group sessions will be added.

For many in the School Readiness Program, the ACT programs are the first parenting instruction these parents have had. The feedback has been tremendous. At one session the parents were all women and they were having a discussion on how to get their husbands to read and put into practice the material and ideas they learned at the ACT workshops. One woman shared that she would put the handouts under her pillow at night and when her husband got in bed, she would pull out the materials and tell him to read first, then they would "talk" later. She said it worked! Another shared that she and her husband read and reread all of the materials together. They decided to become a team and try the new approach they were learning. This woman was so thrilled because a difference could already be seen in their children and because they were yelling much less at their children, resulting in the household becoming more peaceful and relaxing.