To know Aminah Williams is to know humility, loyalty, and dedication. As a Parent Educator with the St. Louis, Missouri-based Parents as Teachers affiliate Show Me Strong Families, Aminah has an insatiable knack for helping children reach their fullest potential by partnering to strengthen their families.
In the foreground, Aminah Williams conducts an in-person home visit before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In her humble, unassuming way, Aminah goes above and beyond what is expected of her in many capacities. As a recently licensed clinical social worker, certified doula, and food and nutrition specialist, in addition to her Parent Educator certification, Aminah exhibits an infectious passion for self-development. Her desire to continually improve both personally and professionally inspires everyone in her presence to do better.
Aminah truly lives the Parents as Teachers mission – which is to promote the early development, learning, and health of children by supporting and engaging their parents and caregivers. She is committed to partnering with families from a strength-based perspective to gain their trust and mutual respect.
Aminah does a lot of listening to help families find their voices and advocate for themselves. She establishes partnerships with them and is constantly looking for ways to bring more value to their lives.
According to her supervisor, Aminah is always ready to share her successful family engagement strategies with her co-workers. Many of Aminah’s colleagues work with a lot of stress and she is often a calming agent who can assess the severity of situations and reassure everyone involved that everything will be okay.
If the heart of a Parent Educator’s job is engaging families, then, Aminah is its cardiologist. She teaches young families living in food deserts how to prepare healthy meals and empowers them to be self-sufficient. She focuses on the entire family, not just the child, as she strives to ensure that low-income families of small children gain access to educational and other community resources.
Aminah is a family advocate who partners with many community organizations to find shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry, clothing items, appliances, furniture, and other much-needed essentials for the families she serves. Establishing partnerships between families and community social services agencies is critical to family success.
Aminah has organized free Nutritional Education and Mental Health Awareness fairs, and events to promote prenatal education in some of Missouri’s most distressed neighborhoods. Her work ethic has been emulated by many in the early childhood development, home visiting field. She often influences her co-workers by promoting positivity, and genuinely wants to help others live the best life they can.
Family and community engagement is at the heart of what Aminah does every day. As a certified Birth Doula in a time when the Black maternal mortality rate is at its highest peak, Aminah provides expectant mothers with knowledge about their pregnancy, helps them create a birthing plan, and comforts them through one of the most challenging times in their lives.
This spring, Aminah participated in a panel briefing to Congressional staff in Washington, D.C., expressing concerns about disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality, where she shared the negative impact of social determinants of health on the families she serves. Aminah Williams is a parent educator for the ages who describes herself as “just a mom and the ultimate teacher who is trying to do some good in this world.”