Innovations

The Institute of Family and Community Impact’s Joyful Together, is an evidence-based program that limits toxic stress in children while enhancing childhood resiliency and adding positive childhood experiences. You are probably thinking “okay… nice, but how?” Joyful Together adds easy-to-do activities to everyday moments to build loving relationships between caregivers and children to enhance relational health and wellness.

Research continually demonstrates how Joyful Together strengthens parent/caregiver and child relationships through play with their children and lowers parent-caregiver stress. This model supports stand-alone parent or family use and can be implemented in schools, communities, healthcare, education-services, and more! Joyful Together is so wonderful, it’s integrated in many of our other innovations as well!

The Father’s Feelings Project is a perinatal depression screening, brief intervention, and warm hand-off referral program for fathers.

Our Father’s Feelings Project is an innovation that grew from IFCI’s research initiative to validate a novel perinatal paternal depression screening tool. This tool was created to increase health equity for fathers as there are no screening tools specifically for fathers during or after the birth of their child(ren). Our ongoing work with fathers resists the social exclusion of dads in early childhood, and stigmatization of men’s mental health by reinforcing how important dads are to a child’s development and overall community thriving. The Project offers safe community spaces and resources for dads to access culturally responsive mental health care, while illuminating dads’ strengths.

The Father’s Feelings Project was co-created with fathers and family-serving professionals through our participatory action research study because our innovations are always informed by the communities we serve. Dads who completed the program had strong outcomes of decreased overall parent stress, improved protective factors for families, and growth in childhood protective factors. The Father’s Feelings Project can be used as a standalone program or can be integrated into community, healthcare, and education services- and more!

We at the Institute of Family and Community Impact envision a world that is built on family vitality and our innovations are developed with this vision in mind. Which is why our Maternal Vitality innovation exists. The current infant and maternal mortality crisis driven by maternal depression in the United States disproportionately impacts Black Americans. This crisis must be eradicated with innovations like our Maternal Vitality Study purposed to create a research-based therapy protocol developed with Black women for Black women. Building family vitality is at the core of IFCI’s Maternal Vitality Study because this study invites Black women to contribute strategies to identify and combat not only maternal depression, but also race-related stressors during therapy. This direct identification of race-related stressors serves to increase healthcare options that focus on cross-generational thriving – not just surviving – but what we at the Institute call building family vitality. Study appointments are one-on-one, flexible, based on your schedule, and can be completed virtually or in person. Compensation for this study is a $25 in Gift Card for participating mothers/women and mental health professionals (each).

CBT Plus is an innovation that was created out of the societal need for a science-informed trauma- and toxic-stress informed, contextually, culturally and linguistically sensitive treatment modality conscious of our clients’ experiences. CBT Plus transforms traditional CBT and changes our lens to be inclusive of client contexts and attuned to client experiences of marginalization and discrimination. Our clients are not flawed, unmotivated, or struggling with faulty thinking. Their contexts of poverty and toxic stress, fueled by marginalization and discrimination have hurt them and their communities physically, psychologically, and spiritually. It is up to us, therefore, to give our clients the best mental health treatment possible for their individual needs and contexts. CBT plus is a tool that allows us to offer that to them.

Story Building Therapy is built upon an understanding of the role of attachment and relationships as well as experiences of shame- and their impact on human development and behavior. Story Building Therapy centers concepts of interpersonal neurobiology, therapeutic relationships, grounding, and storytelling to better appreciate presenting problems or challenges within a psychotherapy setting. This dynamic innovation prompts youth and adult clients to develop a figurative support person or character that will help change the individual’s internalized experience and ease associated symptomology. With this integrative intervention, clinicians have clinical opportunities to support clients in calming their brains and the dysregulated bodily processes associated with feelings of shame.

Nar-ART-ives is a three-part intervention using guided-imagery narratives, drawing prompts and word-based activities to create the perfect combination for integrative, co-regulatory, right-brain therapeutic experiences. Nar-ART-ives co-create images of safety, comfort, protection, community and ability. Using these carefully created interventions, clinicians can induce a therapeutic experience of hope and joy within a psychotherapy setting.

Joyful Together-ECE uses play to enhance relational health through everyday moments between children and early childhood care and education (ECE) professionals. This program equips early childhood educators and administrators with tools to implement the model into daily routines within early childhood education centers and classrooms. The model is aligned with several Step-Up to Quality (SUTQ) rating areas, and continually demonstrates decreased teacher stress and enhanced positive teacher-student interactions.