- Building healthy families in underserved communities.
Overview
Believing that “a child cannot grow up twice,” the pioneering El Nido Family Services was founded in 1925 to provide meals and respite care to undernourished and neglected girls in Los Angeles. El Nido employed multicultural professionals from its target communities, delivered counseling and parent education in non-traditional settings like schools, inner-city churches, and housing projects, and offered home or school-based group services for pregnant and parenting teens.
Today, El Nido continues to build healthy families by providing community-based social services in some of the most underserved communities in Los Angeles County. The Simms/Mann Family Foundation supports El Nido’s Promoting Positive Attachment program.
Desired Impact
El Nido’s Promoting Positive Attachment program serves 50-60 families with young children each year, providing one-on-one counseling for 12-plus weeks in the family’s home or online. Through this program, parents learn strategies to bond with their baby or toddler while learning to manage traumatic experiences in their own lives.
In 2021, the Foundation trained El Nido’s clinicians on how to introduce the CuddleBright® Experience toolkit to families to support the therapeutic relationship and promotion of a positive attachment between parent and child. To-date, dozens of families have received the CuddleBright® toolkit and individualized coaching on how to incorporate it into their daily lives.
