For a home visiting program in Sylva, North Carolina, collaboration is key when it comes to supporting families around a crucial topic.
With funding from Elevance Health Foundation, a group of home visiting professionals, research partners, and representatives from Parents as Teachers National Center gathered regularly in a learning community from 2025-2026. Representing learning from across the Parents as Teachers network, they joined this initiative to contribute to the development of enhanced support for parent educators serving families who have been negatively affected by substance use.
Region A Partnership for Children participated in the Parents as Teachers learning community and counts that influence as a key factor in their forward movement on the subject.
“Without being in this learning collaborative, I don’t think that we would be deep in the trenches of doing this work,” said project manager Randi Braun. “And it’s necessary work … It’s our future generations, and it’s breaking those cycles within families.”
The collaboration informed the creation of a new resource package for parent educators to use in their journey with families. The one-year pilot of that package began in May 2026, as the learning community celebrated reaching the end of its planned course.
Braun also pursued a partnership with Mountain Projects, Inc., a community action agency who provided in-depth training for her team. This included insight into a highly potent new drug moving into the area and a parent handout with educational information on controlled substances. Mountain Projects also provided the affiliate with safe drug storage tools to distribute to families.
With tools from both local and national partnerships, Braun has created a contextualized plan to engage families in their community.
“I took some of those piloting handouts and parent educator resources,” she said, “and I created a custom plan that every parent educator would use with every single family.”
The educational handout from Mountain Projects is also included in the plan. Together, the plan offers an opportunity to engage families in conversation about drug safety, substance use and misuse, and related topics.
Braun’s experience so far seems to show more openness to the topic than she might have anticipated. One factor in particular is key to that openness, though, and it, too, revolves around collaboration.
“I think that goes into the approach that you use and the relationship that you have,” she said.
As pilot phase participants, Braun and her team will use the newly developed tools while providing feedback to guide the final launch of the Parents as Teachers resource package, which is anticipated in the summer of 2027.
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