Brookings County Community Coalition and Facilitating Team
A subgroup of the Brookings County Mental Health Coalition particularly interested in the health of youth and families began meeting in the fall of 2018 for the purpose of bringing evidence-based training to Brookings, the first of which was a free community-wide training by James J. Conway on the Developmental Relationships Framework (DRF) that identifies 20 specific actions that make relationships powerful for young people. (Search Institute, 2017). The county’s school districts, particularly Brookings School District, had collected longitudinal data going back to 1999 using the “Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes & Behavior” survey from Search Institute and reported out to the community, so the actionable DRF from Search Institute seemed a good prospect for establishing a common language and practice approach to building relationships with youth across contexts, especially since the research behind DRF focuses on how youth experience relationships with parents, siblings, friends, school employees and out of school program staff.
The subgroup continued to meet monthly as “Social NETWorks” and identified the following objectives:
- Promote four researched-based activities/events a year that increase resiliency for youth and families. The four promoted events would encourage building developmental relationships, protective factors, and resiliency in youth and family, must be evidence-based, and free and open to the public.
- Increase awareness associated with existing events and available training
- Continue needs assessments associated with youth and family
Social NET Works presented at CPCM’s Annual Response to Child Abuse Conference in 2019, where they first learned about the Resilient Communities: South Dakota program and agreed to take on the role of Facilitating Team to implement it in Brookings County.
