Community Family Trusts, National Association of,
Introduction
A Community Family Trust (CFT) is a whole community approach to teaching relationship skills to everyone, empowering them to make better interpersonal relationships. It is not based on counselling but on teaching relationship skills aimed at prevention rather than cure. CFTs draw largely on the experience of successful programmes in the USA.
The aim is to reduce rates of divorce, domestic violence, truancy, juvenile crime, underachievement at school, and clinical depression, many of which have been shown to be caused by marriage and subsequent family breakdown.
The first such project in the UK was started by Chris Grimshaw in Totnes, Devon in 1999. Chris is now the National Coordinator.
There are a growing number of projects around the UK, a number of which were partially funded in 2002/3 by the UK Government's Lord Chancellors Department.
The following Community Family Trusts have been established as of 2003:
Projects are run by ordinary people locally who want to do something about family breakdown and it's effects on the nation, by halting the loss of relationship skills from communities and preventing further damage to family life.
Relationship skills are taught at various stages of the life cycle from schools, through marriage preparation, and marriage enrichment. For example married couples are trained to administer one of FOCCUS or Prepare/Enrich inventories to engaged couples and to act as mentor couples to help them explore what support they need to prepare for married life together.
It is hoped to extend the work of Community Family Trusts throughout the nation, using the experiences in USA and England. Conferences are held regularly to inform those interested in seeing a trust established in their area.
For more information on the experiences of these trusts in the UK and USA, click on Service Info towards the top right of this page or see below.
The National Association of Community Family Trusts was established in 2002. To find out more about a typical trust visit the Bristol Family Trust web site at www.bcft.co.uk.
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