From June 2022 to June 2024, Parents Plus were delighted to gain funding from a Transformative Grant through Community Foundation of Ireland via the RTÉ Toy Show Appeal. This funding allowed us to build on an existing pilot project and scale up delivery of online Parents Plus programmes with partners Parentline, ADHD Ireland and Family Carers Ireland, the Limerick Northside Family Resource Centre with the Mid-West Family Resource Centre Network.

The work plan over the 2 years was to run 50 evidence-based Parents Plus programmes with our service partners and track the outcomes to improve wellbeing for the families participating. By the end of 2024, we had exceeded this and provided 69 programmes across the Parents Plus programme suite, reaching 866 parents and 2,544 children.

This project represents a successful collaborative approach to providing accessible high-quality parent programmes to families online. The project tapped into a demand and found that as more programmes were opened for registration they booked up very quickly. A core aim of the project was to increase capacity within Parents Plus Charity, Parentline, ADHD Ireland, Family Carers Ireland and the partner organisations throughout Ireland, to meet demand for this support.

The evaluation studies conducted on the Parentline delivery, in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin Psychology Department and the ADHD Ireland delivery in collaboration with the School of Medicine UCD have gathered robust data on the effectiveness of the online Parents Plus programmes and their positive impacts for families.  You can find a summary of the evaluation findings here.

In Autumn 2024, Rethink Ireland announced Parents Plus as one of two awardees for the Growth strand of their Entrepreneurship Impact Fund. The aim of the fund is to support social organisations to achieve higher levels of impact by scaling their innovations and reaching their next stage of growth. This multi-year funding will provide Parents Plus with targeted support in areas such as building organisational resilience and investment and procurement readiness. By working in partnership with Rethink Ireland over the course of three years, and investing in the infrastructure Parents Plus needs to scale deeply, together we will create lasting, positive outcomes for thousands more families and communities, and the services set up to support them.

We are extremely grateful to Rethink Ireland and the private donor for selecting Parents Plus to work with and invest in.

In 2024, Parents Plus was successful in gaining funding from the JP McManus Benevolent Fund to enable us to continue building the capacity of services in Limerick and Clare to improve outcomes for families raising a child with a disability.

Using this grant from the JP McManus Benevolent Fund as well as our own resources and funding from the RTÉ Toy Show Appeal, Parents Plus sponsored training places for 44 professionals from the community, education, health and disability sectors in 2024. We are incredibly grateful to receive this funding to support services who work with high need families, and who have limited funding, to train in and deliver our programmes in their communities.

Filos Community Services has been facilitating the Parent Plus Programmes since 2018. Their practitioners originally trained in the Parents Plus Early Years Programme and since then have also trained in the Parents Plus Children’s, Adolescent, Healthy Families and Special Needs Programmes. The programmes are open to parents attending Filos Community Services as well as from other social service agencies and are also universally accessible to parents who self refer. Many of the parents attending the programmes experience disadvantage. The programmes have also been available to teachers who work in childcare centres who use the principles of the strengths-based approach and strategies to support the children attending their childcare settings.

To draw in parents, Filos publicise the programmes across their social media platforms and word of mouth, with parents from Indonesia and Laos joining in for the online Parents Plus programmes. To date, Filos has had over 700 participants who have benefited from Parents Plus programmes.

Filos embarked on a nationwide initiative called Movements for Health in 2024. The aim of this initiative (‘aware, adopt and advocate’) is to activate communities to strive towards a healthy lifestyle. Filos run a project called P.E.E.R (Play, Eat, Exercise, Rest). One of the programmes that they facilitate under Project P.E.E.R is the Parents Plus Healthy Families. They conducted eight PP Healthy Families sessions last year, with the group of mothers creating a ‘Recipe Book’ of the healthy meals they now cook for their families.

Parents Plus has been working in partnership with Bristol City Council for over a decade to successfully deliver Parents Plus programmes to parents and carers across Bristol. In 2024, we were excited to work with the council’s Families in Focus Parenting Team to deliver our first ever scheduled in-person training open to any education, mental health and community professionals ever in the UK.

More than 20 practitioners attended the face-to-face training in the Parents Plus ADHD Programme (PP-ADHD) at Lockleaze Sports Centre, Bristol, from 6-8 May 2024.  The training was led by Parents Plus senior trainer Fred Ehresmann and ADHD Project Lead Lisa Whitlock, and offered information and materials to enhance neuro affirming practice and support parents and carers. The three day event offered participants a rare opportunity to meet and share expertise with other practitioners from other agencies and authorities.

We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the Families in Focus team on future training events for professionals in the Bristol area, as well as ongoing support for trained facilitators.

You’ll find more information and photos from this event here.