The Biden-Harris administration awarded a federal grant to facilitate training for military families that pushes parents to affirm their child’s self-selected gender identity.
The $850,000 grant project, known as Centerstone’s LGBTQI+ Family Support Program (Family+), intends to provide “affirming interventions for 230 youth and their families” and train 100 staff in delivering these “evidence-based interventions,” according to the grant description.
“Services will be delivered at Centerstone’s Steven A. Cohen Military Family Clinic in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Liberty Army Base (formerly Ft. Bragg), the largest US Army installation, and Pope Air Force Base,” the grant description states. “Family+ will place a key emphasis on serving focus population youth from among the area’s estimated 37,800 children of active duty military members and 82,475 Veteran households with children.”
The grant is funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Centersone’s website offers multiple mental health resources developed using grant funding. One suggests LGBTQ-identifying individuals “set goals” to decrease the impact of “minority stress,” such as attending an “LGBTQIA+ support group” for five weeks or reading “an affirming book for 20 minutes daily for seven days.”
“The Steven A. Cohen Military Family Clinic at Centerstone is here to serve all members of the military community for any mental health needs they present with,” Centerstone told the DCNF.
SAMHSA pointed the DCNF to the program goal outlined in its notice of funding opportunity (NOFO).
“With this program, SAMHSA aims to prevent or ameliorate the development of serious mental health and substance use conditions and disorders and build healthy futures for LGBTQI+ youth by increasing family acceptance and support,” the NOFO states.
One of the interventions the Family+ program will implement is Affirm Caregiver, which seeks to improve parents’ “affirmative caregiving attitudes and behaviors, as well as confidence in caregiver abilities to engage in affirmative caregiving skills with LGBTQ+ youth,” according to the National Center for Youth with Diverse Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression.
A study of the Affirm Caregiver intervention, which was piloted among foster care parents in Cuyahoga County, Ohio and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, found it was effective in persuading parents to adopt “affirmative caregiving behaviors.” The pilot program was funded as part of a 5 year, $10 million federal grant project awarded in 2016.
“AFFIRM Caregiver challenges participants to recognize that being affirmative is not simply the absence of homophobia and trans-phobia, but instead is the presence of clear, explicit, and consistent identity-affirming attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors,” the study explains. “Moreover, participants consistently explore and reflect upon the implicit and explicit biases they absorbed from familial, societal, and cultural messages beginning in childhood that may affect current caregiving attitudes and behaviors.”
A survey given to caregivers before the program asks them to rate their confidence in areas like establishing a “safe space” for LGBTQ identities or providing “identity affirming support” to youth, according to a document previously obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
