The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will receive $1.25 million from the Lilly Endowment to promote family-church partnerships that help immigrant and refugee parents nurture emotionally stable children.
The grant comes through Lilly’s Christian Parenting and Caregiving Initiative, which seeks to help parents and caregivers share their faith and values with children.
CBF has developed a comprehensive three-stage approach to reduce parental trauma symptoms, enhance healthy parenting skills, foster secure attachment and promote effective faith formation and spiritual practices within families, according to a news release. The three stages encompass trauma healing, resource development and faith formation.
CBF leaders said they would invest the program’s first year in extensive research to ensure a strong foundation, conducting listening sessions with families, faith leaders and mental health practitioners. The collected data will inform the development of a pilot program based on the proposed framework.
Then the pilot will scale up, seeking to engage 50 partner congregations in direct care and inviting additional partnerships to benefit from the program’s learnings.
“We’re excited about the potential impact of this transformative program and look forward to nurturing children’s emotional well-being, strengthening families and fostering faith formation within communities,” said Javier Perez, CBF’s director for mission strategy and programs.
CBF is one of 77 organizations receiving grants through this competitive round of the initiative. Reflecting the diversity of Christianity in the United States, the organizations are affiliated with mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Pentecostal faith communities. Many of the organizations are rooted in Black church, Hispanic and Asian Christian traditions.
“We’ve heard from many parents who are seeking to nurture the spiritual lives of their children, especially in their daily activities, and looking to churches and other faith-based organizations for support,” said Christopher Coble, Lilly Endowment’s vice president for religion. “These thoughtful, creative and collaborative organizations embrace the important role families have in shaping the religious development of children and are launching programs to assist parents and caregivers with this task.”
CBF is not new to the Lilly Endowment grant family. Over the past two decades, the quasi-denomination has received multiple grants for a variety of other church-based programs.