Developing and Implementing the Family Acceptance Projectâââ€Å

Decades of research and practice with LGBTQ youth have documented high levels of risk related to stigma, marginalization and discrimination. Surprisingly, because research and practice over several decades focused on LGBTQ youth, and not on their families, little was known about how families respond to their LGBTQ children and how family reactions contribute to their LGBTQ children's risk and well-being. In the late 1990s, Drs. Ryan and Diaz started planning the first research, education, intervention and policy initiative to study how diverse families express rejection and acceptance of their LGBTQ children and how specific rejecting and accepting behaviors contribute to risk and well-being. Founded as the Family Acceptance Project (FAP), this initiative was designed to develop the first research-based family support model to help parents and caregivers to prevent risk and promote well-being for their LGBTQ children to be implemented across disciplines and systems of care. FAP's family support model is grounded in the lived experiences of LGBTQ young people and their families and serves LGBTQ children and youth in the context of their families, cultures and faith traditions. The lack of culturally grounded approaches to supporting integrated intersectional identities is a major barrier to promoting health and fostering self-esteem and positive development of LGBTQ young people. FAP has specialized in aligning its intervention strategies with cultural values so that families and youth feel validated and alliances are quickly established to do the critical work of reducing risk and promoting well-being and permanency. FAP's family support model is being integrated into programs to prevent placement in foster care; to reconnect LGBTQ out-of-home youth; to improve health and mental health outcomes; and to help congregations support and affirm LGBTQ children, youth and families. This workshop will discuss the empirical foundation of FAP's family support model, intervention strategies and family education resources; the participatory research process that engaged LGBTQ young people, parents, foster parents, caregivers and providers at all stages of the work to conduct a series of linked studies, to develop culturally relevant family intervention strategies that include working with socially and religiously conservative families and community leaders to prevent risk and promote well-being for LGBTQ youth; to produce multilingual family education materials that are the first “Best Practice” resources for suicide prevention for LGBTQ young people in the national Best Practices Registry for Suicide Prevention, including the only specific faith-based suicide prevention resources for LGBTQ young people; and to develop risk assessment and psychometric measures to enable providers to quickly identify LGBTQ youth experiencing family rejection to prevent negative outcomes and to help families gauge progress in reducing rejection and promoting their child's well-being. As part of the session, the presenter will screen one of FAP's short award winning family education, intervention and training videos that show how diverse families learn to support their LGBTQ children. This will be followed by audience questions and discussion.