Case study: Families Commission Parents Panel Discussion Group

The Parents Panel is a set of discussion groups designed as a mechanism for understanding the perspective of people raising children in diverse situations. This is central to the Commission’s engagement with families under the Families Commission Act.

Each Parents Panel discussion group includes eight to twelve participants in similar circumstances. The group meets around three times a year to discuss anything that affects people raising children in circumstances similar to their own.

The project is designed to generate in-depth, reflective dialogue directly based on the experience of participants and their peers, thus providing the Commission with a strong foundation for advocacy. While each round has a theme, often a topic of current interest to the Commission, a key purpose of the project is to hear news of emerging issues and promising solutions.

The original cluster of four discussion groups, established early in 2008, is based in the wider Auckland/Northland area. The cluster includes teenage parents, Pacific families, ‘mortgage belt’ families and a group of rural families in Dargaville. An additional cluster of panels based in Wellington and Nelson got underway in late 2008. These include grandparents raising grandchildren and parents of children with disabilities. The Nelson panel has been established at Victory School and involves a group of refugee families.

Each group is co-ordinated by a community organisation selected for their expertise in a particular field, or ability to connect with ‘hard-to-reach’ groups. These organisations are contracted to do the work of recruitment, meeting organisation, facilitation, recording and reporting. Meeting-related expenses are reimbursed and participants are given a grocery voucher as a token of appreciation. Participants are briefed about forthcoming meetings and, afterwards, receive a report that combines results from all groups and notes action taken as a result of information provided by participants.

Evaluation of its early work shows that the Parents Panel

• produces information important to the Commission’s work
• alerts the Commission to emerging issues
• elicits suggestions as to potential solutions
• is a community engagement mechanism that those involved find useful and meaningful.

Partner organisations have welcomed the project as a genuine channel of communication through which the views of families in their communities can be communicated to an agency with the role of advocating for change. Participants enjoy the meetings. More importantly, they feel heard.

One co-ordinator reported:

"Participants are very keen to participate in the next round of discussions...It is important to note that participants made statements such as 'Are you sure you really want to hear what I have to say?' and 'It’s about time the powers that be asked us little people what we want' and 'This is the first time ever, and I’ve lived in Mangere all my life, that I’ve been asked to talk about what’s important to my family’."

Much of the Families Commission team's learning has been about the logistics of maintaining a mechanism of this kind: looking after participants and working collaboratively with partner organisations demands careful attention to administration.

They have also learned the importance of setting topics that are not so wide-ranging that they restrict the time available for participants to talk about matters that they themselves have noticed in their own communities. Most importantly, the Commission has learned from the project evaluation that, not only is it good community engagement practice to inform all involved about action taken as a result of their input but, this feedback is experienced as a mark of respect. 

Case study uploaded December 2008.