ALLEGHENY FAMILY NETWORK

Vision: Families will be empowered, respected, valued, and encouraged by an accepting community and responsive child-serving systems and providers. Mission: Through peer-to-peer support, education, and advocacy, we partner with families of children with behavioral health needs to improve their quality of life. Values: Encouraging family voice, building natural supports, empowering parents by using a strength-based approach, encouraging collaboration between families and service providers, practicing persistence in helping families reach their goals, and providing individualized attention to each and every family. Board of Directors Composition: The Board of Directors consists of committed people from higher education, health care, social services, psychiatry, and other professions. The majority are parents or caregivers who are raising or have raised a child with a behavioral health challenge. Staff Composition: All AFN employees must be a “family member with lived experience”; they have the experience of raising a child who has behavioral health needs. Their varied lived experience offers a wealth of knowledge and experience to the families we support in AFN’s services and activities. AFN staff members are also skilled at negotiating the child serving systems, including child welfare, behavioral health, juvenile justice, substance abuse, and the education system. AFN’s direct service staff are called Family Support Partners (FSPs). As parents who have encountered similar situations as the families they serve, they understand the challenges and struggles families face in their daily lives. They offer families hope, compassion, and empathy, they empower parents to advocate for their children, and they connect them to needed resources so that the family can achieve its life goals. Family Support Partners are highly trained. Staff become credentialed in at least one program but may be credentialed in 2 or more.