COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
This curriculum is gender-responsive and melds cognitive-behavioral and trauma-focused evidence-based strategies. In doing so, it offers a road map for both accountability and healing. This curriculum is designed to help justice-involved women and gender-diverse populations address their trauma and build skills needed for healthy relationships. This program can be used for community-based groups or in-facility programming. Used as an ongoing program, this curriculum has proven to help communities and facilities be safer and healthier. Click here for the full report.
Many justice-involved women and members of diverse populations have experienced trauma, cruelty, and relationship violence. In order to make lasting change, we ask participants to be accountable for the impact of their behaviors toward others, while also accepting responsibility for healing the impact of the cruelty that was inflicted on them long before they were able to protect themselves.
This curriculum can be used effectively with justice-involved women and diverse populations within a range of settings. These settings include:
- DV Intervention Groups for Women and/or LGBTQ+ populations
- Jails and Prisons
- Out-patient recovery
- Post-incarceration support
- Probation and parole
- Other community-based programming
Services and support offered by FPI include:
- Curriculum with full facilitator’s guide (Preview Here)
- Participant workbook
- Facilitator's Training Series for facilitators
- Training for staff and administration on FPI approach
- Ongoing consultation/technical assistance and support
- Instruction/mentorship regarding peer leadership development
FPI can provide the program in your community or facility (as capacity allows), or train your facilitators to implement the curriculum with ongoing consultation and support.
What participants are saying about this program:
“I feel relief, deep healing, love, trust, I am good enough, and not angry… This group has been the best thing that has happened for me.”
—Program Graduate
“This class has taught me to see how the action or words of others can trigger the shadows that drag me into that “River of Cruelty”. Instead of acting in a negative way… I know I can deal with those people and things they say or do to me in a positive way.”
—Program Graduate
“For the past 10 years, I have helped facilitate a self-help group at the women’s prison in Topeka, Kansas. All but a few of its members have experienced debilitating levels of emotional, physical, and sexual trauma. Some of the members have taken the Peaceful Families class. I don’t know what goes on over there, but I do know that the program’s graduates come back different. They are calm, thoughtful, ready to rebuild, and anxious to do something positive with their lives.”—Dave Ranney, volunteer, Reaching Out From Within Program
“Every person on my caseload who has ever been involved with Peaceful Families has commented on how much they have had to “dig deep” inside themselves. This not only serves as a vehicle for introspection and self-exploration but has had the effect of making them more willing and open to further self-exploration. In my opinion, this curriculum gives a multi-layered gift to the individual and in turn the facility by giving them the opportunity to begin to learn and secondarily, whetting their appetites for more growth.”
—Unit Team Leader, Kansas Dept of Corrections