You may have heard about one of Sanctuary’s newest programs called Relationship Intelligence or RQ. Since the project started last year, we have received many requests to implement the educational cycles. RQ cycles consist of 17 interactive hours of discussions, presentations, and future planning. The overall goal of the project is to increase the number of youth who have the skills and knowledge they need to create and sustain healthy relationships and marriage.
The curriculum we use for our educational cycles was developed by Dr. Richard Panzer who has been following us on facebook.com [“like” our page on facebook.com under Relationship Intelligence]. Much to our surprise, Dr. Panzer personally contacted us regarding a training opportunity that was available. He expressed how he was proud of the work we were doing and encouraged us to share the news of our success and our efforts with other service providers throughout the nation. Unfortunately, we are unable to send a representative to the training being held at the end of this month due to financial matters. However, we are looking forward to the next training opportunity which we will definitely attend.
Due to the nature of the lessons we use, participants must be between the ages of 12 and 18 years old. Originally, we anticipated a total of 60 to 80 participants per year. However, we had served more than 300 participants last year, and estimate a total number of participants above 500 this year. Our team feels that part of the success of the program is due to the “matter-of-fact” nature of our presentations and our attempts to remove the blindfolds that society has metaphorically secured over our youths’ eyes. We find that one of our biggest challenges is overcoming the sentiment that teen pregnancy, divorce, broken homes, and fatherless children are simply-common-place situations; these issues are a part of the normalcy we expect on our small, family oriented island. This is not okay!
As we continue to work with our community organizations and partners, we find that the need for a healthy relationship and family preservation initiative is greater than we had expected. We continue to implement our preventative education cycles with as many participants as possible. However, like many organizations, we are facing a funding shortage and are not able to provide the service to all who request. Still, we do everything we can to ensure that the youth who are interested in the cycles are giving the opportunity to participate; we employ creative scheduling, off site cycles, and even make-up sessions. So, RQ Ready?
