Augment the Existing Community Services Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) describes an intervention based on existing tribal services.

Our primary family-based intervention was in a tribal Head Start program, so in that context, what we did was to augment the existing services of what was already an excellent tribal Head Start program by providing really two things. One was an adjunct service provider called a Family Ally who went into the homes to meet with families and find out what additional resources might be useful whether it was social service resources or educational or financial resources, how to help connect people up with services. It's standard general home visitation, but very consistent with, since these were paraprofessionals, the tribal extended family structure as opposed to official agencies or entities that people need to interface with.

The second was this storytelling component which involved weekly meetings with parents and caregivers where we had videotapes of traditional stories of this tribe and talked a lot about how stories could be used to help facilitate children learning and growing and so forth. We ran a parallel curriculum in the Head Start classrooms in which the kids had access to these stories. The idea was to get parents and kids to start doing more storytelling.

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