The fundamental mission Healthy Families Nampa is to promote the emotional and financial well-being of all families and children through the coordination and delivery of faith-based and community services that support healthy relationships, strong marriages and responsible fatherhood. Objectives include:
- Improve the emotional and financial well-being of children by:
- increasing knowledge and skills to help couples prepare, form and sustain healthy marital relationships;
- increasing knowledge and skills to encourage responsible fatherhood;
- increasing parenting knowledge and skills for surrogate parents; and
- increasing parenting knowledge and skills for unwed mothers and fathers.
- Create a working community coalition anchored by faith-based community involvement to initiate and implement a community-based practice that supports healthy relationships, marriages and responsible fatherhood.
- Establish community norms that support safe healthy families and responsible parenting.
Services for premarital, married couples and parents aim to help improve relationships, thereby preventing divorce and reducing the need for child support services and other social service support programs. Faith based service providers commitment to the project includes delivering services at no cost to economically disadvantaged individuals. Only contracted secular service providers receive compensation for direct service delivery to individual participants.
Core Programs:
- Premarital Education and Counseling
- Marriage Education, Counseling and Enrichment
- Parenting Education and Counseling
- Fatherhood Education and Mentoring
Organization:
Healthy Families Nampa is a 52 member community-wide coalition composed of spiritual, civic, education, ethnic, media, and business leaders dedicated to improving the emotional and financial well-being of children by supporting healthy relationships, marriages and responsible fatherhood. Providing a wide spectrum of comprehensive services to Nampa residents to increase the likelihood of healthy relationships and involved responsible parenting.
Funding:
The project primarily operates because of the good will of the Nampa community and generous partners. A five year grant of $554,000 with a 2 to 1 match was awarded to Healthy Families Nampa on May 7th, 2003 by the federal Department of Health and Human Services. For every dollar the community raises the grant matches it with two dollars. Funding for the Healthy Families Nampa project is from a Child Support 1115a Demonstration Waiver. The grant is federal child support money that is set aside to test specific programmatic strategies. The grant awarded to Healthy Families Nampa Coalition is not coming out of the Idaho State budget. To facilitate this project the waiver sets aside the following child support rules and places a strong emphasis on the monitoring and evaluation components. The Nampa project has a 7 year evaluation period. The 1115a Demonstration Waived rules include:
- Participation to be limited to residents of Nampa, Idaho only, versus to all child support clients in Idaho,
- Federal Financial Participation (FFP) for activities that promote healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood, and
- Federal support funds are able to be matched with private funds. Historically federal funds are matched only with state funds.
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