Nothing About Us Without Us

The National Center for Family and Parent Leadership, powered by the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, believes that when parents are supported as leaders, the benefits are clear: families are stronger; children, families, and programs have better outcomes; and systems are more effective because families help shape decisions to be more equitable, culturally relevant, and customer-centric. 

To achieve this, the National Center for Family and Parent Leadership provides a comprehensive array of capacity-sharing opportunities and supports to help states, organizations, and communities embed Family and Parent Leadership (FPL) as their new way of operating. 

We are grateful for the support of the Pritzker Children’s Initiative for providing seed funding to launch the National Center for Family and Parent Leadership. 

What is Family and Parent Leadership?

Family and Parent Leadership is a set of intentional practices, values, and steps that systems, agencies, and organizations adopt to build the structures that allow parents to influence systemic decisions about early childhood services and programs they use or need.

For more than three decades, parents in Michigan have been building a movement to lift up the voice of families and empower parents to influence decisions and actions affecting their lives, specifically, around the state of early childhood. Family and Parent Leadership (FPL) can take on many forms, including serving as full and equal decision-makers within local institutions and system-building efforts, building strategic alliances and parent-led coalitions, building local capacity, and taking strategic actions to bring about change and hold systems accountable. 

Who are Parent Leaders?

We refer to parents and families interchangeably to mean all adults with a primary role in caring for a child. 

This includes biological, adoptive, foster, and stepparents, grandparents, and other caregiving kin, and legal and informal guardians. It could also include parents who do not live with the child and are still involved in raising the child and thus have important perspectives as a parent.

Key Definitions & Terms

  • Focuses on the relationship between families and program staff or providers, who are responsible for “serving” them within the context of a program in which their children are participating (i.e., state-funded pre-K).

  • The experiences parents have with the parts of the system, including but not limited to programs, service staff, policies, and mindsets.

  • A set of interacting and connected parts that has a shared purpose and functions as a whole. A system has characteristics and deep structures that include:

    Mindsets – attitudes, values, and beliefs that shape behavior

    Components – the range, quality, effectiveness, and location of programs, services, and opportunities

    Connections – the relationships and exchanges between and across different actors, organizations, and system characteristics

    Regulations – policies, practices, procedures, and daily routines and habits that shape the behavior patterns of individuals, groups, and organizations

    Resources – human, financial, community, and social resources that are used within the system

    Power – how decisions are made, who participates, whose voice matters, and the structures to support inclusion

  • The continuous, intentional work to address root cause of inequities, not just their manifestation. This includes “elimination of policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes” by race, class, age, ability, gender, and other social determinants, or that fail to eliminate them.

  • The comprehensive array of learning opportunities and processes that aims to strengthen the skills, practices, habits, networks, and resources of the participants to support their equity-centered parent leadership goals and initiatives.

What We Do

Virtual office hours and technical assistance

Parent leadership and recruitment

Parent payment processing

Customized capacity-sharing plans

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