Promising Futures: Best Practices for Serving Children, Youth, and Parents Experiencing Domestic Violence

The Promising Futures website is a useful resource for helping agencies transform or enhance their program’s ability to effectively meet the needs of women, children and youth experiencing domestic violence. The website is organized around five major topics:

• Get the Facts: includes general information and statistics about the effects of domestic violence on children, parenting, and outlines some guiding principles for enhancing our services for children and youth.
• Program Readiness: is designed to assist programs in revisiting their infrastructure, physical environment, policies and practices to better support the mother-child relationship and institutionalize the notion that our advocacy for mothers and kids should be connected in every way.
• Interventions for Children and Youth: includes searchable database of promising practices and evidence based clinical interventions for children and youth to help programs promote healing and resilience among mothers and children together. This section also includes some resources and information on working with special populations, and adaptation and evaluation of programs.
• Advancing the Field: discusses how advocates can be more intentional about implementing research informed practice including trauma informed strategies and partnering with researchers to document our success. This section also contains, Communities in Action which highlights innovative leaders in the field who are working on implementing new and enhancing existing interventions and policies to better serve children and youth within their programs.
• Tools: includes a multitude of resources to assist programs in capacity building including training curriculum, resources for families, and tools for research and evaluation.

This website was created to provide information on evidence based interventions and promising practices that are trauma informed, developmentally and culturally relevant, and strengthen the mother/child relationship.