Minnesota Family Strength Project: What We Learned

What We Learned
By Leonard Witt
Executive Director, Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative

FROM THE TIME the Minnesota Family Strength Project was first conceived, we planned to discover what was right with families rather than what was wrong. We believed that the stronger and more caring families are, the stronger and more caring communities will be. We wanted to learn which qualities make families strong.

The Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative held public forums around the state. Family and Children's Service conducted formal, groundbreaking family research with more than 2,000 Minnesotans. Medica Health Plans did additional research on the relationship between overall family strength and use of health care services. And the Minnesota Historical Society will be collecting and archiving thousands of our Family Album forms in which Minnesotans just like you will be telling their own family stories. The Allina Foundation provided the funding.

Our family forum participants told us that all families, not just dysfunctional ones, were relying more than ever on the greater community. Over and over again on our tour of the state, we heard people from healthy families extol the virtues of caring neighbors, community agencies, and even workplaces that support family life. Terry Steeno, executive director of Family and Children's Service, says that family needs have taxed public agencies' resources to the point where government and social service agencies cannot continue to do it all by themselves. He says that the workplace, places of worship, neighborhoods, the wider community, schools, health organizations, and families themselves must all pitch in.

The formal research and forums tell us that we must build better human connections. We must have more face-to-face contacts with our immediate families members and our neighbors. We are creatures that require others around us for our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

Perhaps forum member Lynn Askew of Apple Valley put it best: "Building a strong individual will build a strong family." But who is going to build that individual? Traditionally it was family and extended family - mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles. Today many of us live far away from our extended families, and find ourselves faced with redefining what family life is.

Comments from our forums reinforce that notion. Phyllis Burrous of Moorhead said, "My neighbor has really adopted my family. It's really a blessing for my kids." Barbara Knapper of Virginia said, "Our neighborhood has been our extended family. The neighborhood family has become our grandparents, aunts, and uncles."

Talking about his workplace, Swede Steltzer of Moorhead said, "Our owner's philosophy is that companies are going to be the new neighborhoods."

Jerry Andersen from Northeast Minneapolis said, "I've been volunteering in a second-grade classroom two days a week and I've been delighted by the fact that at the end of the school year, I am grandpa to 18 kids. So not only am I a helper, but in a way I'm kind of extended family to these kids."

The strongest families are those that make the most person-to-person connections. That's why sharing meals and family rituals are so important. People come together when they share experiences, knowledge, or just personal warmth. Each time families come together for a positive activity, they enrich the individuals, and that in turn enriches the entire family. And since most social scientists agree that the family is the basic social unit, strong, caring families will result in strong, caring communities.

Judy Tiesel's Family and Children's Service research project reminds us that strong families come in all varieties. She says that government, schools, and health systems must take this variety into account, and must think of each family as a group as well as a collection of individuals.

Now that the definition of family has been extended well beyond bloodlines, each of us has a greater obligation than ever before to reach out to those around us - to share our strengths, be they mental, emotional, physical, material, or spiritual. We as individuals must bring a certain intimacy to the world that government or bureaucratic agencies cannot. We don't have to fix another family, but we should help bolster its members. Our contribution can be sharing mothering experiences, becoming grandparents to a classroom of kids, acting as a neighborhood's grandma, or becoming a company owner who understands the individual family needs of the workers. It's all about caring, and that's what the best and strongest families have always been about.