In June, 21 members of FLOURISH’s Community Leaders Cabinet graduated from a Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI)-inspired training. COFI trainings help parents utilize their own strengths and commitment to their neighborhoods to create a positive impact within their own lives, their families and their communities.
The goal of the training was to equip parents with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to tackle issues as community leaders. The facilitators of the training were moms who are members of the Making Change Happen Leadership Academy through Generate Health. After going through a similar training a few years ago, these moms decided they wanted to help more parents take ownership to create community change. Over the past eight months, they learned how to successfully facilitate a training.
“Our original group of COFI-trained parents showed resiliency throughout the process of learning how to facilitate. They put a lot of time and effort into understanding the COFI model, and I think that benefited the Community Leaders Cabinet members who attended,” said Lora Gulley, director of community mobilization and advocacy at Generate Health, the backbone organization of FLOURISH. “This approach also reflects FLOURISH’s shift to elevating community members to lead our work.”
The training was designed to help parents harness their leadership skills. Participants first learned how to set goals, identify obstacles to achieving goals, and tap into a network of support. From there, they created long-term personal and family goals, then worked together to develop an action plan for their community.
“They felt a strong commitment to invest in themselves, find their voice and use their power to enact change,” said Gulley.
For their action plan project, the Community Leaders Cabinet participants chose to create a pop-up resource hub to provide health and wellness resources to families in St. Louis zip codes with the highest rates of infant mortality. Currently, participants are in the first steps of implementing this project.
To learn more about the role of the Community Leaders Cabinet, visit https://flourish.tpidev7.com/who-we-are/our-leadership/.
