Calling all Louisianans | Get the Sizzle Back | Teaching Marriage | Go West Young Man.... 1/19/08

[Smartmarriages]

- CALLING ALL LOUISIANANS!!  TIMES ARE RIPE....
- GET THE SIZZLE BACK
- TEACHING MARRIAGE - YES, WE CAN......
- AROUND THE COALITION: CANFIELD & HARGRAVE MOVE TO CALIFORNIA

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- CALLING ALL LOUISIANANS!!  TIMES ARE RIPE....

> Chris Gersten of FAMLI is organizing a Louisiana-only conference call to
> mobilize people to work with newly elected, marriage-friendly Governor Bobby
> Jindal to secure TANF funding for marriage skills programs.
> 
> Date: February 7, 2008  Time: 12:00 pm CST
> 
> To register for the Call.
> 
> 1. Login at the FAMLI Site. (www.famli.us) <http://www.famli.us/>
> 2. Click on Conference Call Registration and select the call date.
> 3. Registration info will be emailed to you.
> 
> This is a unique opportunity to work with a pro-marriage governor. If
> Louisiana can organize like their counterparts did in Texas, Utah, New Mexico,
> New York, Alabama, and Georgia we can win 1% of TANF funding for marriage
> strengthening programs.
> 
> Please register early as registration for this call is limited.

I might add, we're looking for a hero.  It only takes one person to take the
reins and drive this home as Maggie Russell did in Texas where in 2007 they
legislated $15 million in funding FOR MARRIAGE EDUCATION!  Of course, Maggie
would say it was totally a team effort.....so, YA'LL get on this call. I
also want to add that there's a template available - a step-by-step how to
do it guide - on the Famli site plus help and coaching from those that have
gone before including two workshops in San Francisco:

> 319
> Working with State Legislators
> Carolyn Curtis, PhD, Chris Gersten, Maggie Russell, and a panel of legislators
> Learn to open doors, build relationships, and provide compelling info on the
> benefits and feasibility of supporting marriage. Plus what other states have
> accomplished including "1% Solution" TANF set asides.

> 719
> Texas: How¹d They Do It!?!
> Daphine Lambert, PhD, Jeff Johnson, Maggie Russell, Erin Kincaid
> In 2007, a grassroots coalition passed major legislation which provide $15
> million in state marriage education funding. Lessons learned, challenges, and
> guidelines for your state.
  - diane 

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- GET THE SIZZLE BACK

The Arps just completed a state-wide 10 GREAT DATES training tour in
California.  You can imagine their delight when driving down the road, they
spotted this billboard in Yuba County!
http://www.smartmarriages.com/uploaded/10GD%20Billboard.jpg

The Arps will present several times in San Francisco including a MASTERS
workshop and as part of the McManus Marriage Savers Institute:

> 701
> 10 Great Dates ­ TOOB
> Claudia and David Arp, MSW
> Teach this proven, widely-used program in your church and community. Combines
> fun with marriage skills and opens the door for other programs. Bonus: new
> Latino version!

> 114 Two Days - Tuesday & Wednesday, July 1 & 2 - NO CEU
> Creating Marriage-Saver Congregations & Community Marriage Policies
> Mike & Harriet McManus
> Learn how to reduce the divorce rate to near zero in your congregation and
> slash city divorce rates in half by training Mentor Couples who can put a
> "safety net" under every marriage as they prepare couples for life-long
> marriage, enrich existing marriages, save 90% of the troubled ones, help the
> separated to reconcile, and stepfamilies to be successful. Learn how to create
> a Community Marriage Policy. $100 spouse discount.  Click for more
> information:http://www.smartmarriages.com/marriagesavers.html

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- TEACHING MARRIAGE - YES, WE CAN......

> Ms. Turner's group gets federal marriage-promoting money that started being
> handed out under the Bush administration, but at least one candidate who has
> little good to say about President Bush, Senator Obama, talks up his support
> last year for a bill to reduce anti-marriage incentives in public assistance
> programs.
> 
> That marriage deserves promotion and can be taught seems to be an idea that's
> not so much transcended politics as simply sunk in under the skin. America had
> a 40-year fling with thinking marriage wasn't very important, says Ms. Sollee.
> "We found it didn't make anyone better off."
> 
> Whether pushing marriage will make a difference isn't certain. Once broken,
> can institutions that grew organically be restored artificially? Mr. Buck
> thinks so, as do others.

Teaching Marriage 
BY PATRICK McILHERAN
January 18, 2008

You'd think LeHavre Buck was teaching at Comedy College. He was rolling out
one story after another, laughing at himself through his teeth with the
sound of a radiator just turning on. Half a dozen young people in
desk-chairs at a Milwaukee YMCA chuckled along.

They were learning, all right. Mr. Buck is a pastor and he was teaching
three couples how not to put asunder what God was going to join together. He
was teaching them how to be married.

You can do that, says Mr. Buck, and he's not the only one. For half a
decade, restoring marriage has been enough of a policy movement to attract
both politicians and the skeptical gaze of PBS culture-war documentaries.
Now, says Mr. Buck, whose Protestant congregation has been one of those
nationwide taking part in the annual Black Marriage Day, the idea is
spreading among those essential platoons of central city life, churches.

Diane Sollee, a former marriage therapist who founded a new group, Smart
Marriages, aimed at obviating therapy, has been putting on conferences about
promoting marriage since the 1990s. She drew 400 people in 1997. This
summer, she's expecting 3,000. The idea that churches, which are all about
helping people change their lives, can teach one to find marital happiness
is catching on nationally, she says.

As Ms. Sollee sees it, the task is made easier because we now know why
couples don't get along. It's usually the same things, she says. We know how
they can change that, she says. The habits that keep a marriage healthy
aren't complicated. Some people, however, need to be taught them.

So Mr. Buck was doing that on a Thursday night in a new Y in a battered
neighborhood. He talked about alienation and withdrawal and how his wife
adores "Boston Legal" while he doesn't but how he watches it anyhow just to
be near her. They've been married 43 years. When he says this, it shocks
young people sometimes, in a good way. "You're trying to bring them into a
different understanding," he explains. "We're trying to show this is
possible."

They don't ordinarily see it around them, he says. In one of his other jobs,
Mr. Buck and a non-profit outfit, the Center for Self-Sufficiency, run
abstinence classes for middle schoolers. They're really classes about
marriage, says the center's head, Angela Turner, getting the idea to
11-year-olds that marriage makes it likelier you'll be happy and prosperous
and that it's something achievable. Among Milwaukee's African-American
children, a group that largely coincides with the city's poorest stratum,
about one in four children live with both parents, a bit below the national
figure of three in 10. "Children are not seeing how to do things
differently," says Ms. Turner, and it shows in consequences ranging from
poverty to dropping out of school.

Children want to do things differently. Polls of those on the edge of
teenhood routinely show that, says Ms. Turner. Unmarried mothers say they
want to be married, says Mr. Buck, only they don't know how to get it, how
find Mr. Right, how to find even Mr. Halfway Decent, given how many young,
poor men are either jobless or incarcerated.

This is the critique one hears of the marriage movement ‹ that poverty
depresses marriage, that joining two broke people merely doubles
destitution. Mr. Buck isn't buying it: He recalls his childhood
neighborhood, filled with couples of limited opportunity who nonetheless
were more stable and happy ‹ and mainly married.

In 1940, about 86% of black children were born to married couples, which led
to progress, he says. It can happen again without waiting for urban
economies to improve first. More than half of teens abstain from sex
already: Teach them how to relate well and find marriage and they'll live
happier lives, Mr. Buck says. And he isn't a right-wing think-tanker saying
this, either ‹ it's a man who delivers ground-level social services in an
old industrial Midwestern city. Ms. Sollee, who runs her national group out
of Washington, describes herself as very liberal. Ms. Turner's group gets
federal marriage-promoting money that started being handed out under the
Bush administration, but at least one candidate who has little good to say
about President Bush, Senator Obama, talks up his support last year for a
bill to reduce anti-marriage incentives in public assistance programs.

That marriage deserves promotion and can be taught seems to be an idea
that's not so much transcended politics as simply sunk in under the skin.
America had a 40-year fling with thinking marriage wasn't very important,
says Ms. Sollee. "We found it didn't make anyone better off."

Whether pushing marriage will make a difference isn't certain. Once broken,
can institutions that grew organically be restored artificially? Mr. Buck
thinks so, as do others. Churches seem suited to the task. They're built on
the assumption that humans are imperfect but capable of change, and marriage
has long been part of their franchise. It's a big job, says Mr. Buck, but
"you just keep plugging away at it."

One student, gathering her coat after class, thanks Mr. Buck, saying she had
never seen how to be happily married because she'd grown up with a single
mother. It's like validation of what he's been saying.

And what he is doing. "I believe it's going to save my community," he says.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

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- AROUND THE COALITION: CANFIELD AND HARGRAVE MOVE TO CALIFORNIA

The Boone Center for the Family is pleased to announce the appointment of
its new Executive Director, Ken Canfield, PhD.  Having extensive experience
in working to improve family well-being, Canfield will replace Founding
Director, Dennis Lowe, PhD, who will continue as psychology professor and
the M. Norvel and Helen Young Chair in Family Life at Pepperdine University.

Canfield brings more than 30 years of experience to this assignment.  He has
founded or been a founding member of several organizations dedicated to
strengthening families and fathers, most notably the National Center for
Fathering where he served as President for 16 years. Canfield was the
Director/Co-Founder of the International Family Center, where he developed
family life education modules for churches and community groups. He has
testified to the national Commission of Children, served as a founding
member of former Vice President Al Gore¹s ³Father to Father² initiative and
honored with the Father of the Year award by the National Congress for Men
and Children. 
--------------------

TERRY HARGRAVE
After many years at Texas A & M University in Amarillo, moves to Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August '08.  We're very pleased that
Hargrave will present a Master workshop in San Francisco on his latest book:
Boomers on The Edge.

> 601
> Boomers on the Edge
> Terry Hargrave, PhD
> Boomers have always been out front, leading the revolution. They now face
> three enormous challenges. Explore how boomers can use these issues to
> strengthen rather than destroy their marriages.

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12th Annual Smart Marriages® Conference, Hilton San Francisco Hotel,
July 2 - 5, 2008  
Pre-Conference Training Institutes June 30-July 2
Post-Conference Training Institutes July 6

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