Restoring Empowerment and Choosing Hope (REACH)
Purpose
The goals of REACH are to help adults develop the skills they need to develop healthy relationship and marriage skills, improve ability to parent and co-parent effectively, identify and enhance skills and abilities required to gain or retain economic self-sufficiency, and foster family stability and increase successful marriage rates. Data from the tri-county region comprised of Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties demonstrates the presence of a number of risk factors affecting family stability, including high rates of single-parent households, births to unwed mothers, and high median rent costs compared to poverty rates and income. By providing families with relationship enhancement, parenting, and economic self-sufficiency services, this should help to optimize each family member's quality of life and improve child well-being.
Conditions
- Intervention
- Wait List Control
Eligibility
- Eligible Ages
- Over 18 Years
- Eligible Sex
- All
- Accepts Healthy Volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria
- adults age 18 or older - interested in education about strengthening their current marriage or committed relationship - reside in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties on the Gulf Coast of Florida
Exclusion Criteria
- under age 18 - do not reside in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties
Study Design
- Phase
- N/A
- Study Type
- Interventional
- Allocation
- Randomized
- Intervention Model
- Parallel Assignment
- Intervention Model Description
- The Intervention group will start with assigning a Case Manager and begin Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) class weekly and meet with their Case Manager as needed.
- Primary Purpose
- Treatment
- Masking
- Single (Outcomes Assessor)
- Masking Description
- The outside evaluators will remain blind to each condition throughout the study.
Arm Groups
| Arm | Description | Assigned Intervention |
|---|---|---|
|
Experimental Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) Intervention |
The Intervention group will be assigned a Case Manager and begin Marriage and Relationship Enhancement Skills (MRES) class weekly and meet with their Case Manager as needed. |
|
|
No Intervention Wait list control |
The Control group will be placed on a wait-list and offered services as soon as they complete the study's final 22-week follow-up measures. Control participants will not be assigned a Case Manager and will not receive any comparable services from our agency until they complete their 22-week measures. |
|
Recruiting Locations
Sarasota, Florida 34237
More Details
- Status
- Recruiting
- Sponsor
- Jewish Family & Children's Service of the Suncoast, Inc.
Detailed Description
REACH will serve a minimum of 337 individual adults during each full year of the five-year grant term in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties on the Gulf Coast of Florida. REACH will target individual participants and, in cases where both members of a couple are interested in participating, will deliver services to each partner individually. The primary target population for REACH is low-income, at-risk individuals. Coupled with its successful history of providing healthy marriage programming, JFCS is well-positioned to help families in crisis become more stable and self-sufficient. Understanding the inextricable link between financial security and family stability, REACH is targeting and reaching the most vulnerable individuals based solely on economic risk factors. REACH will incorporate a comprehensive employment program combining both job and career advancement. This will help families in crisis reach improved financial stability, which will in turn improve the ability of individual participants to be better parents and better partners, furthering the goal of promoting healthy marriages and reducing local divorce rates.