Framework for Implementing the ACT Program in Communities
Implementing the ACT program in a community is a complex operation. It requires motivation, commitment, understanding of, and experience with intervention implementation and financial support. The figure below illustrates the different levels mobilized collaboratively to ensure the program’s success.
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The framework includes the following components:
- Community support: To be successful and effective, a program needs to be part of a social context and respond to its needs. Forging partnerships with the involvement of local partners ensures that community values and needs are incorporated into the program and will minimize obstacles.
- Organizational support: A program needs to be located within a structure providing administrative coordination, support, and sustainability. It is possible to have different organizations involved: those devoted to training professionals to deliver the curriculum to parents and others engaged in offering the program to groups of parents. But the same organization could serve in both roles.
- Financial support: Adopting the program requires creating a marketing plan, organizing and conducting the ACT Facilitator training workshops, purchasing and printing materials, and some mentoring to those trained, and organizing program groups for parents.
- Evaluation: Evaluation results can be both a tool for refining the program and a means to promote and leverage support for the program.
The research-based curriculum is organized according to three central themes:
Knowledge and beliefs about child development: Parents and caregivers must understand what children are capable of understanding, feeling, and doing at different ages and stages of development.
Relationships: Abuse and violence occur in the context of relationships in an environment that is not conducive to healthy interactions. It is important that parents and caregivers understand that a strong, nurturing, healthy bond with their children creates a positive foundation for the rest of their lives.
Parenting skills: Parenting styles and practices have an impact on children’s behaviors. Parents need to be provided with positive, science-based parenting options that help them raise their children free of abuse and its consequences.
We understand that much of parents’ resistance to changing their practices is the result of a lack of knowledge and access to information about child development, emotion regulation, and positive models and strategies that help parents raise children without resorting to yelling and physical punishment.
Therefore, the ACT Program curriculum addresses the following topics:
- Understanding Behavior Change and Motivation
- Understanding Children’s Behaviors (Child Development)
- Young Children’s Exposure to Violence
- Understanding and Controlling Parents’ Anger
- Helping Children Manage Difficult Emotions
- Children and Electronic Media
- Discipline and Parenting Styles
- Discipline for Positive Behaviors
- Parents as Teachers, Protectors, and Advocates at Home and in the Communities
- The program is delivered in nine sessions, each averaging two hours, to groups of parents and caregivers by trained professionals known as ACT facilitators.
- It is based on a psychoeducational model that is based on individuals organized in groups and is designed to combine interpersonal interaction and exposure to educational materials and information.
- The program is helping diverse groups of parents in communities in several states in the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
- The program is also in many countries, such as Bosnia, Brazil, Colombia, Croatia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Greece, Japan, Peru, Portugal, and Taiwan, and it continues to expand.
- All training and educational materials are developed by APA for individuals at a sixth-grade reading level. Materials are copyrighted under APA’s name. The materials have been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Croatian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Romanian, and Greek, and have been adapted to the different cultures where the program is implemented.
- ACT is helping mostly low-income and minority parents who have expressed appreciation for the program and its interactive, fun, and non-judgmental pedagogical approach.
- Its strong, strength-based curriculum, addresses violence in children’s lives, focuses on positive discipline and applies a motivational interviewing approach.
- The length of sessions (two hours on average) makes it possible to cover the curriculum topics.
- Its effective relational nature (parent-to-parent, master trainer-to-facilitator-to APA program national office) works through interactions and chains of support.
- It capitalizes on professionals’ passion and has a universality that crosses cultural borders.
- It uses practice and reflections to create learning and behavioral changes.
- It creates network for parental support.
- It is user friendly, practical and easy to implement and it is flexible.