The COFI Institute for Family Focused Organizing completed a busy month of trainings on COFI’s Family Focused Organizing model. Staff and leaders of community organizations across the country participated in training to learn COFI’s unique leadership and organizing model.

COFI trainers were on the road in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with the Washtenaw County Great Start Collaborative; in Boston, with Vital Village Network; in Flint, with the Genesee County Great Start Collaborative and in Battle Creek, Michigan with the Calhoun County Great Start Collaborative.

Locally, COFI trainers worked with school staff in the Chatham community with the Greater Chatham Initiative and early childhood providers and school staff in Oak Park with the Early Learning Collaborative to share COFI’s model and parent success stories.

To wrap up the month of training, community organizers and parent leaders participated in COFI’s Phase 1: Train the Trainer: Self Family & Team – held in English in Chicago and in Spanish in Elgin! Participants were introduced to the COFI model and learned how to recruit parents, how to use COFI’s training curriculum for leadership development and how to process works to build power. The trainees visited The Concerned Parents of Melody at Genevieve Melody STEM School to meet the parent team and hear their stories of parent leadership and organizing. Participants joined from Alaska, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Connecticut, Oak Park and Chicago.