Family Support America’s Mission (Adopted in 1995)
The mission of Family Support America is to promote, strengthen, and expand the family support movement. The family support movement seeks to strengthen and empower families, neighborhoods, and communities so that they can foster the optimal development of children, youth, and adult family members.
Vision (Adopted in 1995)
Family Support America envisions a society in which all of us—families, communities, government, social service institutions, and businesses—work together to provide healthy, safe environments in which children and families can live and work.
Core Capacities
Family Support America has identified its current core capacities as knowledge building, convening conferences and meetings, providing consulting, technical assistance and training, and publishing and disseminating important tools and resources for the field. In recent years, Family Support America has sought to:

• Develop common definitions, terms, frameworks, and name recognition for family support
• Build formal and informal networks that advance family support
• Continuously develop and update baseline information about family support as it exists throughout this country
• Increase and enhance opportunities for the dissemination of knowledge about quality practice
• Strengthen family support policies and practices in all family-serving domains

Family Support America’s most important and growing core capacity is in its work in advancing parent engagement as necessary to all efforts to strengthen families.
Family Support America has made progress in each of these areas of work, and that progress has strengthened the family support field. From this work and from the challenges of current economic and social environment arises a need for increasing the reach of family support.
Family Support America defines a family Support center as:
A family support center is a warm and welcoming place in the community to which any family can come, not only in times of need, but as a regular part of day-to-day life. Most family support centers offer parenting education classes and materials, child development activities, parent-to-parent support groups and mentoring, parent-and-child activities, and information and referral services. These are modified and added to depending on the needs and desires of local families.
Family support centers are unique in their approach to working with families: they build families’ strengths and capacities, serve as a hub for the community, work for positive social change, and offer help without stigma. Parents act as resources in all sorts of capacities, from sitting on a decision-making board to helping others develop job skills to cooking food for a pot-luck.
Family support centers are in diverse settings: free-standing buildings; schools; libraries; churches, temples, and synagogues; clinics; and other location.
Research shows that by investing in positive outcomes for children and families, family support centers can lead to:

• fewer teenage pregnancies
• less juvenile delinquency
• improved behavior and performance of children at school
• fewer incidents of child abuse and neglect
• more families moving from welfare to work
• increased self-confidence, knowledge of child development, and parenting skills among parents
• greater educational attainment among parents