Faith Based Initiative at Work in the Juneau Diocese, Healthy Marriage Initiative

The Family Outreach Office, which has been in existence in its current form for about a year now, seeks to promote the dignity of all human life, believing that loving and just family relationships build up the Church, strengthen society, and glorify God. The efforts of this office are dedicated to strengthening, healing, and celebrating the vocation of marriage and family in the Diocese of Juneau by enriching the spiritual and personal relationships of the engaged, married, widowed or divorced, their children, single-parent families, and any other family units.

As we begin this second year of this office, we have received a Healthy Marriage Initiative Grant for close to $50,000 through the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services to help us in our efforts and to expand our offerings beyond to Catholic community to all of the local communities in Skagway, Haines, Wrangell, Petersburg, Ketchikan, Prince of Wales, Sitka, and Yakutat. These monies will hopefully enable us to provide more and better services and programs that promote and support the formation and maintenance of healthy, married two-parent family.

The grant has money allocated from travel to each of these communities and has several other aspects:

• Marriage Preparation Program: The grant will enable us to both train and provide enrichment for “preparing couples.” The goal is that every parish would have a couple trained to serve in the ministry of marriage preparation.
• Couple Enrichment: Each parish community will have either a 3 evening or a half day workshop series for couples on any of the following: communication, conflict management, family of origin and personality styles, needs-expectations-interests, forgiveness and trust, intimacy.
• Parent Education: The grant has enabled the Family Outreach Office to purchase some excellent resources (video/dvd series) for use in your communities or by individual families: “Active Parenting Now,” “Active Parenting of Teens,” “The Essentials of Discipline,” “Child Development” and “Common Sense Parenting.” Every community will have a 6 session parenting workshop for parents sometime during the year.
• Domestic Violence: The grant will assist us in funding sexual abuse prevention training for our church employees and volunteers, and the parents and children of all ages in each community. This is something the diocese is both committed to and required to do each year.
• Website: The Family Outreach part of the diocesan website, www.dioceseofjuneau.org, is now up and will continue to be updated thanks to the grant funding. Be sure to visit this site as it contains information and resources on: family life, marriage preparation, healing ministries, healing ministries (loss through death, divorce, separation and post-abortion healing), Natural Family Planning, and upcoming events. There is information about what services the Family Outreach Office offers in each of those areas, many online resource links, and a list of the Family Outreach Office library resources that can be borrowed for personal or group use. All you have to do is click the e-mail link to me and let me know what you need and when. I hope you’ll visit the site and take advantage of the variety of resources it offers!
• Connecting individuals and families with local resources. Every parish staff member and volunteers will have a list of local resources for their use when someone comes to them for help. Please feel free to seek their assistance or mine.
• Welcome to community at-large. These programs will be advertised to the entire local community who are encouraged and welcome to participate.

I’m currently looking for a “family life coordinator” in each of these parishes. That person would work with me to help to coordinate programs locally. If you are interested in being that person for your parish, please let your pastor or me know. It is a great way to help bring programs and resources into your local community.

I am grateful to the State of Alaska for their support of the programs we are offering!! Hopefully, it will enable us to better meet the needs of couples and families in Southeast. And for those of you who are not in one of the targeted communities, please don’t hesitate to ask for any of these programs for your parish or mission.