Building future communities: strengthening relational bonds for a positive future

Abstract

Communities play a special role in the development of families and their children. Community-based family support is recognized as an efficient and respectful way of helping families with complex lives. Researchers who strive to produce and share relevant knowledge with them should be concerned with the development, implementation, and assessment of these programs as well as working with the community itself to build the knowledge-guiding program development and community action. In this brief report, the authors report the process and results of 4 collaborative community reflection meetings aimed at strengthening and promoting the positive development of the families and children in the communities. We present the results of a qualitative analysis aimed at describing the communities’ preferred future and identifying the processes leading to them. The authors present an emergent prototheory and discuss its implications for practice and future research.