Including Parents in CISV activities

We often find that parents don’t see Junior Branch activities as educational and interesting CISV events. Frequently, I’ve seen them drop of their children at Junior Branch activities, and leave. Then they come back to pick them up, make sure that their kids had a good time, and then leave again. We wanted to show that our activities are interesting and that both parents and childrencan benefit from parents getting more involved into their children’s CISV life.

We decided to make these our goals, and reach them in one day. It took a lot of work to plan. We looked for ways to show parents what we do with their children, because we know that parents love more seeing their offspring enjoying themselves, and sharing that good time with them. We also wanted to give them a more “serious-looking” explanation of Junior Branch.

Everything was prepared and the day of the event was finally here.  We separated the time into two sessions, and the group into two sub-teams. For the first session we split parents and children; the children played games and the parents took part in a short Question & Answer activity about Junior Branch.

To keep the activity with parents simple, we asked them to write down what they thought Junior Branch was, their concerns and expectations about it, and how often they considered that there should be Junior Branch activities. Then we collected the sheets of paper, and sat down with them, trying to answer all their questions, and giving them a complete explanation of Junior Branch.

Since the other group wasn’t finished with their activity (Branch Out Step 1), we had some extra time with the parents. So we decided to introduce them to CISV’s educational content and learning approach. For this we explained, with examples, the ASK (Attitudes, Skills, Knowledge) and DR.GA (Do, Reflect, Generalize, Apply) models. After this, we asked them to use the tools they learned from these models, and plan a 30 minutes Junior Branch activity on Diversity.

This activity worked better than anyone could have expected. The parents asked us to give them more time to finish, and the usual awkward 10 minutes at the beginning of planning sessions were brought down to 2 minutes. (don’t really understand this but never mind!)

For the second session, we gathered everyone together and ran another activity (Branch Out Step 2), which was conveniently focused on age diversity. The entire group enjoyed it and, as we had such a big age range represented, we heard very different opinions on the topic.

All in all, it was a very successful day. Many parents came to us afterward to tell us how educational this had been for them.Many of them had never even heard of Junior Branch, or didn’t have a clear idea of what it is. Several parents also offered their help, and said they would be more likely to pay attention and get involved in future Junior Branch activities.

At the end of the day, we asked if there were more questions and made sure to have everyone’s contact details.

We learned that this was a good way to gain everyone’s trust; parents and the Chapter. Even though the results did not show a huge increase of attendance at Junior Branch events, it helped to establish Junior Branch as an important part of CISV Belgium.

By Emi Bels