Office of Family Assistance
Healthy Marriage Demonstration Grant

Allowable Activity: Marriage enhancement and marriage skills training programs for married couples (#5).

Organization Description: University Behavioral Associates was founded in 1995 by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Montefiore Medical Center and is the main provider of behavioral health care in Bronx, New York. Additionally, the organization has long-standing relationships with local welfare-to-work programs and has the capability to manage information for hundreds of married couples.

Use(s) of ACF Program Grant Funds: The University Behavioral Associates Healthy Marriage Program intends to use funds to provide marriage enhancement and marriage skills training programs to low-income married couples. Additionally, the program recognizes the varied ways in which people learn and will use lectures, hand-outs, role-playing and group discussion to show participants the benefits of creating a healthy marriage. Some of the goals and desired outcomes are to recruit 100 married couples with children per year for participation with an 80% completion rate of the marriage education curriculum and at least 40 couples continuing the program for booster sessions and special activities.

Office of Family Assistance
Healthy Marriage Demonstration Grant

Allowable Activity: Marriage education, marriage skills, and relationship skills programs that may include parenting skills, financial management, conflict resolution, and job and career advancement for non-married pregnant women and non-married expectant fathers (#3).

Organization Description: The Research Foundation of SUNY, Stony Brook University is a non-profit organization located within the Stony Brook University campus. They proposed to use a highly innovative, empirically-supported, empowering program for income, unwed parents soon after the birth of a child.

Use(s) of ACF Program Grant Funds: The Research Foundation of SUNY, Stony Brook University plans to provide marriage education, marriage skills, and relationship skills programs that may include parenting skills, financial management, conflict resolution, and job and career advancement for non-married pregnant women and non-married expectant fathers. They will use the “Couple CARE for Parents” program as a cultural model to essentially reach out to 1000 couples over a five-year period by having, (1) the first session in the participant’s home; (2) using at-home video-based training and practice, supplemented with weekly telephone consultation with a skills educator; (3) emphasizing the self-directed change, whereby participants learn both the skills and the process for setting their own goals, attempting changes, and self-evaluating improvements and; (4) focusing on a critical period (i.e. birth of a child) when couples are most open to prevention.

Office of Family Assistance
Healthy Marriage Demonstration Grant

Allowable Activities: Education in high schools on the value of marriage, relationship skills and budgeting (#2) and pre-marital education and marriage skills training for engaged couples and for couples or persons interested in marriage (#4).

Organization Description: Shalom Task Force (STF) was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1992 in New York City with the goal of uprooting domestic violence in the Orthodox Jewish Community. Its mission is to prevent domestic abuse and promote peaceful-family relations.

Use(s) of ACF Program Grant Funds: Shalom Task Force will work with over 30 community collaborators to offer relationship and marriage education workshops to high school students as well as seminary, yeshiva, and post seminary young women and men who are interested in marriage or engaged. Community collaborators will serve as key portal institutions serving the community. Using the Bertha Kaufman Educational Awareness Program (BKEAP), Shalom Task Force will train 10 leaders and hold BKEAP workshops for 1080 high school seniors and 550 men and women in seminary, post seminary, or yeshiva. Teachers of brides and grooms in the target population will be trained to teach communication and conflict resolution skills and to recognize and prevent domestic violence.