Regular attendance is an essential element in a program’s achievement of its intended outcomes12,13. Consistent attendance and participation helps ensure HMRE program participants gain the knowledge and practice the skills taught in the workshops14. However, many things can get in the way of attending HMRE services. Participants can face issues such as difficulty finding child care, competing work schedules, and transportation issues, including limited public transportation or the price of gas.
Stephanie shares how staff from The Parenting Center's Empowering Families program encourage participation in the program
Grantees in STREAMS provided the following to help address these barriers and encourage consistent attendance:
- Participation supports: To help participants overcome barriers to attendance, the sites in STREAMS provided support in the form of transportation assistance, meals, and child care. All the adult-serving sites in STREAMS offered meals before or during the workshop sessions. TPC’s Empowering Families program, University of Denver’s MotherWise program, and FWCA’s Career STEAMS program offered child care. Couples who attended the Empowering Families program described how a meal and child care made the program feel more like “date night” and gave them an opportunity to focus on their relationship. Most of the STREAMS sites also offered transportation assistance in the form of public transit vouchers, gas cards, or rides to the program from staff.
- Financial incentives: Outside of participation supports, all the adult-serving programs in STREAMS offered financial incentives linked to attendance-based milestones that met the guidelines of their federal grants. Incentives were generally gift cards.
- Make-up sessions: Despite the availability of participation supports and incentives, scheduling conflicts and other life circumstances can make it hard for participants to attend all regularly scheduled workshop sessions. Grantees in STREAMS offered participants a variety of ways to make up missed sessions. For example, the ELEVATE program offered online prerecorded sessions. For FWCA’s Career STREAMS program, participants could make up missed sessions in one-on-one or group formats before or after a regularly scheduled session. Programs often required participants to make up missed sessions to receive their incentives.
Tip for HMRE providers: Relationships also kept participants coming back
Although many STREAMS participants said the financial incentives and participation supports were important to them, they also cited their relationships with program staff and other program participants as important motivators for sustained attendance. For example, in a focus group in FWCA’s Career STREAMS program, participants discussed how the financial incentives got them to enroll in the program, but their continued attendance depended more on the relationships they formed with program staff and other participants.
MotherWise participants discussed the relationships they developed while attending the program