As part of a multi-year pilot project designed to address Adverse Childhood Experiences, the New Hampshire Children’s Health Foundation provided funding to build Trauma Responsive Communities (TRC) in four areas of the state. The Greater Nashua Smart Start Coalition serves as the regional lead for Greater Nashua’s work around early childhood education and supports.

Established in 2016, the Smart Start Coalition is made up of individuals and organizations that are “working together to ensure that every child in our community has the best possible start to life.” The Coalition focuses on young families with children from birth to age 8, and the service providers and educators that serve them.

Membership in the Smart Start Coalition has averaged 30 active members over the last nine years. The group values collaboration and holds membership meetings ten times per year. The Greater Nashua United Way helps to facilitate the group’s engagement.

Organizations involved include Child Care Aware, Waypoint, New Futures, Boys and Girls Club, Milford Kids Thrive, Nashua School District’s 21 Century Learning, and Adventures in Early Learning at Nashua Adult Learning Center, Greater Nashua Public Health, HeadStart, UNH Cooperative Extension and the Greater Nashua United Way.

The challenge

“Nashua Pediatrics participated in the Foundation’s Trauma Informed Care in Pediatric Primary Care pilot,” explains Foundation Program Director Patti Baum. “Communities in that cohort were subsequently eligible for Trauma Responsive Community funding from us.”

The early childhood coalition within each region of the participating pediatric practice sites was contacted to discuss how they might be able to elevate the existing resources in the community or region to support families with young children.

The approach was intended to reinforce what families were hearing in their pediatric primary care visit and to build on what already exists within each community.

“Our request was that a coalition which committed to participate would use a policy, system or environment approach to the model they intended to follow,” adds Baum.

Liz Fitzgerald, is Director of Community Impact with the Greater Nashua United Way. She explains that the Coalition and the Foundation initially talked about Coalition agency partners doing ACEs evaluations and hosting film screenings about Adverse Childhood Experiences. However, the Coalition soon realized they could have more impact by beginning with a community engagement process to discover how to best serve the needs of families with young children.

Parent engagement

“We decided to focus on positive childhood experiences and parent engagement,” says Fitzgerald. “Our goal then became to understand what parents are looking for from the community to feel seen and heard and supported in a very basic way. Not for particular cohort, but just creating a rich environment and kind of community where you want to raise your children,” she said.

The Smart Start Coalition developed four pillars: positive learning experiences; strong families; maternal and child health; and community collaboration.

“Each one of those pillars could have taken a piece of what equals being a trauma informed community, Fitzgerald says. “But we didn’t really want to pit them against each other.”

So, the Coalition decided to conduct an environmental scan through community outreach and engaged a professional facilitator help them think through their options.

“After talking to a lot of people and discussing it within the Coalition in great depth, we chose to put our efforts into the strong families pillar,” explains Fitzgerald.

“And a lot of what we heard in our research had to do with connection, like places for families to meet and places for families to gather” adds Fitzgerald.

“We heard from a fair number of parents who have children with special needs or who may be on the autism spectrum, and they felt like they had nowhere to go to not be the ‘disruptive child’ in the playgroup or the meetup or what was already available in the community for connecting with other families. So, they felt a little isolated that way,” says Fitzgerald.

“And we heard from people who said ‘There’s nothing in the park for toddlers. So if I go, I don’t find people. I don’t know when to go to connect with families.’ So again, we heard that parents are really just looking for connections,” Fitzgerald said.

The Smart Start Coalition also heard that many parents were looking for an informal, friendly space where they could be vulnerable and ask, “I think I’m a good parent, but am I on the right track? What’s the information? I don’t know all the resources.”

Flipping the script

This friendly-space concept took on the name “healing spaces.”

This fit with the Smart Start Coalition’s efforts to support parent networks. They conceptualized healing spaces to be spaces where parents and caregivers could meet to voice their hopes and concerns for their families and have the connections needed to make change happen. With that in mind, the group decided to target the Foundation’s support on engaging parents and sharing power with them to create healing spaces in the Greater Nashua area.

The effort to create these is facilitated by parent-led groups – not professionally-led groups. Each parent network is also connected with agencies within the Greater Nashua Smart Start Coalition so participants can learn about available supports to promote their family’s health and success. For the purposes of New Hampshire Children’s Health Foundation funding, these spaces created an environment change that served to link parents and caregivers with supports and services.

Patti Baum notes, “While each of the trauma responsive communities have included parent engagement as a component of their process, the group in Nashua has really leaned into to the parents taking the lead. It’s been wonderful to learn how the professional staff have worked to transition their power as leaders to leadership by parents. I suspect it was a risk for staff, but the outcome has been full of rich experiences.”

Fitzgerald added, “Being parent-led means we, ‘the professionals,’ ask, ‘How do you want to convene?’ Instead of telling parents when and where the meeting will be. Or “What kinds of things do you want to make happen?’ and not telling them what we, the professionals, think should happen.”

“They wanted to help organize and orchestrate information sessions or topics that were of interest to them and at times that were convenient for them. We heard, ‘Okay, don’t just come and tell me about stuff. I don’t want to hear about something in a meeting that I then have to go to another meeting to participate in. I want to get you to come to my meeting and do the thing.’ Whether that be lead screening or developmental screening or vision screening or any of those technical things.” Fitzgerald adds.

“We now leave it to the parents to choose the topic, and then the Coalition will meet them where they’re at and bring the program to their spaces rather than run around and share flyers for times that don’t work for them,” Fitzgerald says.

“They call it flipping the script,” she added.

Giving parents what they want

Under the banner of The Nashua Family Network a 15-member parent leadership team meets every three weeks. It orchestrates events to happen in the community. They invite the broader group of parents they know and also recruit others. Stevie Klein, United Way’s Family Engagement Coordinator, supports the work of the Network’s parent leaders.

“We don’t drive the agenda,” Fitzgerald emphasized. “They drive the agenda.”

Activities parent groups organize include pop-up playgroups, community baby showers, book clubs where participants read and discuss parenting books and the Coalition helps match them with an expert in the topic to have a conversation about the book.

An online group called Southern New Hampshire Pandemic Parents has 500 online members and shares information that way.

There’s a fatherhood group being sponsored by the Public Health Department. “It started out really to just share experiences as a father,” says Fitzgerald. “And it was amazing because the guys in the group were very vulnerable about their own experiences of being a son and what they want things to remain like for their parenting experience and things they want to be different. It became very supportive.”

Many of the fatherhood group’s spouses and partners participate in the Nashua Family Network and the fatherhood group welcomes women to join.

“The fatherhood group has been really interested in support from the Coalition to help them understand what postpartum is and how they can be the most helpful and understanding of what their partner is going through,” Fitzgerald added.  “As a result, we have a series of postpartum workshops for families that we stepped up through the Coalition too.”

Defining healing spaces

The Nashua Family Network’s leadership group meets every three weeks and is doing the work of the Foundation’s grant. Their goal is to define and refine “What constitutes a healing space and what are its elements?”

A healing space is meant to be a safe space that is peer-led and has support from the community and the nonprofit agencies that exist to help families.

The leadership group has been working with other community parent groups to test the healing space definition.

The other local parent groups have the opportunity to weigh in on the definition and hopefully adopt it — which will add sustainability to the model.

These parent leaders have been working with New Hampshire Listens over the last several months to learn facilitation skills so they can help make sure that their gatherings are safe spaces and rules of engagement are respected. Parent leaders share leadership duties in each of their meetings to build that important capability.

“The Nashua model is unique in many ways,” notes Patti Baum. “The community members learn about so many things related to parenting, including organizational resources and many other supports. They have worked hard to reach parents who are interested, especially those who may not initially step forward. The approach is truly a lesson for both the Foundation as well as other community engagement efforts. I look forward to following their work going forward.”

“All in all, it’s been really good and healthy,” Fitzgerald concluded. “The parent groups are kind of building the bike as they’re riding the bike, but they’re getting to a place where they feel really successful and that they are creating the something that is what they were setting out to create.”