Over the years, more than ninety private and community foundations and corporations have supported CICC in general and for specific projects; including the Ford Foundation, Xerox, ARCO, Walt Disney, and Mattel.  Hundreds of individuals have made tax-deductible contributions.

CICC has conducted professionally led parenting instructor training sessions for over 30 years.  These week-long sessions train and certify people who work for schools, community agencies and religious groups to deliver one of CICC's national parenting skill-building models: Effective Black Parenting, Los Ninos Bien Educados, or the New Confident Parenting curriculum.  Over 7,000 individuals from more than 2,500 local organizations have been trained and graduated from these sessions. In turn, they have educated thousands of parents in their communities. In August 2021, with the retirement of Dr. Kerby T. Alvy, Founder and Executive Director of CICC, CICC) gifted the Program to DCCTF.  

 

The DCCTF has been a partner of CICC to conduct training for the Effective Black Parenting (EBP) curriculum since 2015.  The District of Columbia’s child protection agency has adopted the curriculum and has promoted it among its sister cities and states.  For example, in 2022, Pennsylvania requested and received training for 30-50 organizations that are educating parents across the state!  With the adoption of this program, DCCTF will establish a national center for parent education.

The two curricula for specific cultures honor the histories of their people and recognize the special parenting challenges that racism and prejudice have created.  Depending on the problems and issues of current concern to communities, these programs have been selected to combat child abuse and neglect, delinquency and drug abuse, and to promote mental health and student achievement.  Because two of these curricula are designed for and have been successful with African American and Latinx families, they are currently in demand in child welfare settings to address the often-shocking disproportionate numbers of children from these cultures that are being reported for abuse and neglect.

Research on these classes show that they produce increases in parental confidence, reductions in parental stress, improvement in parenting skills, increases in the use of positive parenting practices and reductions or elimination in the use of spanking and hitting.  They also serve to improve overall parent-child relationships, reduce child behavior problems, and increase child cooperation, self-esteem, social adjustment, and academic achievement.  The overall class serves to strengthen the entire family.

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Each curriculum is a series of classes with specific topics and skills. They teach a positive approach to parenting and convey important information about the ways children learn. They all prepare parents to use a variety of communication and disciplinary skills such as:

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• Effective Praise

• Effective Verbal Confrontation

• Family Rule Guidelines

• The Thinking Parent's Approach

• Teaching Pride in Blackness

• Teaching Children to Help the Black Community.

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Thus far, more than one million parents nationwide have been educated to be more effective and sensitive through these programs and projects.

 

Research studies where graduates of these instructor workshops were followed up 6 and 18 months after completing training show that they make as many as six important uses of what they have learned. Here are a list of actions they complete:

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1. train parents in groups through classes or seminars,

2. train individual parents and families one at a time,

3. train parents as part of other services such as a part of counseling services,

4. use the skills they learned in their relationships with clients, colleagues, and family members,

5. use the skills in training staff members to use them with their clients, and

6. deliver community presentations to educate the public about the benefits of the programs.

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While CICC found these programs to be very helpful to parents from all walks of life and from a variety of cultural groups, they were more difficult to deliver and required more creativity on the part of the instructor to make them work with ethnic minority groups such as Latino Americans. Even when the programs were taught in Spanish, as they all had Spanish translations, they still required special efforts to make them as meaningful to Latino American parents.

 

It was not just an issue of the parenting skills being harder to teach with Latino Americans but also that the family concepts and values in the initial programs differed so much from what so many of these parents believed. Indeed, the original programs never mentioned or addressed differing cultural values or child rearing traditions.

 

CICC shared these realities with the leaders at the National Institute of Mental Health. They urged CICC to join forces with their minority mental health centers on the west · coast to develop a project that could change this situation.