Many agencies begin offering the Chicago Parent Program (CPP) with grant or philanthropic support, but sustaining services after the funding ends can be challenging. We spoke with Dr. Amie Bettencourt, Director of CPP Training, about funding options agencies may use to support ongoing CPP implementation. Here’s what we learned.

The National Center for School Mental Health (NCSMH), based at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, seeks to strengthen policies and programs that improve child and youth mental health and well-being in schools. Recently, we sat down with clinical psychologist Samantha Reaves and lead training specialist Kelly Schaffer from NCSMH to learn more about the National Center and, more specifically, its partnership with the Chicago Parent Program.

For more than twenty years, the Chicago Parent Program (CPP) has brought parents together in community centers, schools, and Head Start programs to strengthen relationships with their young children and build confidence in managing behavior. As the program expanded, its developers began hearing a consistent message from the field: some clinicians were informally adapting CPP for one-on-one use because many parents could not attend group sessions. The intent was practical, but results varied. “The approach wasn’t evidence-based or replicable,” recalls CPP co-developer Dr. Debbie Gross.

A central mission of CPP is to ensure the program is both evidence-based and highly accessible to families from underserved communities. Dr. Sarah Beal, Professor and developmental psychologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, has been working with the CPP team to adapt CPP for a new population of underserved families: foster and kinship caregivers. Foster and kinship care is a temporary, court-ordered arrangement in which children who cannot safely live with their parents are temporarily placed in out-of-home care with licensed foster caregivers or relatives. 

When Dr. Susie Breitenstein began her career as a child and adolescent psychiatric nurse, she often found herself at the intersection of clinical treatment and the untapped potential of parent involvement. “At the time, treating child mental health issues usually meant focusing on medication, with much less attention given to helping parents build the skills to support their children and address challenging behaviors before they escalated,” she says. Those early experiences sparked a pivotal shift in her thinking: what if more could be done to intervene early, building parental skills before challenges became entrenched?