FAST App - Families & Schools Together

All parents love their children and want a good life for them. But poverty, racism, and sexism adversely affect child development causing toxic stress, diminishing parents’ capacity to be the primary teachers and nurturers for their children. FAST empowers parents as advocates for their children’s education, reducing toxic stress and social isolation to support mental health, and creating long-lasting connections between families, the school and community. The FAST Program has been implemented across the US and in over 25 countries. Through Covid, we have had to utilize existing technology to continue running since March 2020. We are now further developing this technology into the FAST App (spearheaded by a Parent Graduate of the program)  allowing for deeper program impact, increased access to resources for parents and families who are socially or geographically isolated, and stronger child/parent mental health and school connectedness outcomes.

Poverty, racism, and sexism have detrimental effects on children, negatively impacting child development, increasing toxic stress, and diminishing parents’ capacity to care for their children. This is an immense challenge that impacts nearly every community worldwide. With Covid, many of the inequities that existed were further exacerbated; children attended school remotely full or part-time for over a year. In Brazil, where schools are still closed, latest UN Research reports 5 million children lost connection to schools. Families were disconnected from family, friends, community centers leading to isolation and increasing toxic stress. 

We cannot claim to completely solve these large, systemic problems, but FAST ameliorates their impact by increasing protective factors and building resilience. FAST provides a proven, evidence-based structure through which communities can strengthen intra- and inter-family relationships, increase school connectedness and empower parents to advocate for their child’s education, and build connections between families and community resources. Covid, as a global crisis, forced us to develop and pilot a virtual model to continue to reach families; further development of this new delivery will help us deepen our impact and reach more families as we begin to fully realize the impact of the pandemic on our children, families, and communities.

Our solution will deepen existing FAST Programs through the use of integrated program-based technology: the FAST App. For 15 months, we developed our virtual program delivery utilizing existing platforms - Facebook, Zoom, Google Classroom, YouTube. Through initial pilot programs, held in many of our locations around the world, we learned that virtual delivery can reach isolated families and provide support, but we also identified new areas for utilizing technology to further our impact. 

FAST, developed in 1988, has demonstrated strong outcomes to support child/parent mental health and connection-building between families - schools - communities. But, we recognize that the world now looks quite different than it did in the 80s; many of the parents we serve use technology in their daily lives. We have wanted to integrate technology into our program, and Covid forced us to take action. The App will enable parents to access resources, regardless of internet access, to connect with other parents in the program, both in their community and around the world, will facilitate family connection to the FAST Team, school, and community resources, and will overall strengthen engagement of the family with the school and broader community, to support children to succeed academically and beyond.

FAST has run in 48 states in the US and 25 countries, and is highly flexible to local cultures. Developed around social justice and community organizing theories, FAST builds power among disenfranchised parents, families, and the community by bringing together groups of 10 - 15 families twice per year (the whole family is invited to attend.) Anyone who participates in the program receives services and support - children, siblings, parents, grandparents. Involving the whole family of the child, enables program outcomes to be more sustainable and longer-lasting, than interventions which engage solely with the child. Multiple levels serve children 0 - 18 and their families. Most commonly, schools running FAST serve children from primarily low-income families and families of color. FAST has demonstrated an 80% retention rate - 80% of families who attend the first night, will complete the program.

Facilitated by a FAST Team, which is representative of participating families across race, ethnicity, language spoken and includes parent, school, and community partners, participating families receive respectful, culturally-relevant “coaching and support. FAST does not teach parents how to be “better” parents, but rather recognizes the inherent knowledge of parents (which is often undercut or ignored) and empowers families together, with the school and community, to support children. In each community that runs the program, there is usually a coordinating entity that is deeply connected to the community, which works in collaboration with the school to run the program. During the program, families eat a meal together, play games that facilitate open communication amongst family members; parents have an opportunity to talk with other parents, share experiences, challenges and information, but most importantly, build relationships (which research shows last for many years following). The most important piece of FAST is one-on-one, parent-child interaction called Special Play: a well-researched and proven tool to support child well-being and readiness to learn, that involves child-led, nondirective, imaginative play. 

This last year, as we implemented the program virtually, FAST Teams heard from parents about wanting easier access to additional resources at home. We knew families needed access regardless of internet availability. The FAST App, an idea conceived of and spearheaded by a Parent Graduate of the program (who serves on the Solution Team), responds to direct needs of the families, providing instant, readily-available support and information. We previously utilized existing platforms - Facebook (parents shared videos of themselves doing Special Play on the group’s Facebook page), Zoom, Google Classroom/Meet for parents to connect. But, the App would be an opportunity to provide additional resources that had not previously been available to parents. Isolated at home, many parents took pride in their child's imaginative play and in posting their special play time for others to see. By having more resources available at the ready, parents and children can participate in more regular, daily Special Play and other activities, which are immensely beneficial for children’s well-being and readiness to learn. This will be a core aspect of the FAST App.

As we continue to test our new technology with the program, we will continue to solicit parent feedback. Each cycle of FAST is evaluated; parents are able to share their experience and impressions, so we will continue to refine as needed based on user feedback. Our goal is for this app to be available to every family participating in the program, across the US and with our international partners in Brazil, Czech Republic, UK, Australia, and Canada. Specifically in this pilot, we will test the FAST App in 2 schools in Brazil, 2 in the Czech Republic, and 2 in the US. After further refinement, we will look to expand the reach and impact of the App across all of our sites. The FAST App will empower parents through easy access to information and resources and provide a direct way to connect with other parents, with the FAST Team, with staff at the school, and with community resources.

Disparities in education, across race/ethnicity and income, were exacerbated by Covid and negatively impacted children academically, socially, emotionally. FAST App strengthens academic support and child well-being, building strong parent-school connections. Work schedules, language, lack of resources are barriers creating inequitable access for families. Families from marginalized communities are often made to feel unwelcome, powerless or that their parenting skills are “lacking.” The App counteracts this power imbalance, giving power, knowledge, and tools directly to parents, connecting families, teachers, and community, reducing barriers and ensuring families and schools can work together for equitable education for all children.

The FAST Program is a well-established program that has been operated broadly across the US and internationally for over 30 years; however, historically, the power of technology was not utilized to strengthen program impact. Over the last 15 months, FAST and our partners developed a virtual program to serve families despite a global pandemic and rampant school closures. Through the delivery of the virtual program, we learned what works best to support families remotely, and what was missing. The FAST App was developed from the learnings over the last year utilizing feedback from our agency partners, teams, and parents and families. Further integrating the use of technology through the FAST App will help deepen the impact of the program. We plan to pilot in 2 schools each in Brazil, Czech Republic, and the US, gathering input from parents, aiming to grow the App across all our sites.

There is no program quite like FAST which combines social justice and community organizing principles, with clinical interventions to support parent and child mental health, empowerment with social capital development, rigorous research, and local adaptations by community representatives, alongside parents, teachers and community leaders. This combination allows us to achieve a very high retention rate - 80% of families who come to our program once, will graduate from the program (attend 6 of 8 sessions). 

Introducing technology, through the FAST App will help set our program apart. Historically, information is passed to parents through direct interactions, sometimes providing written resources as a follow-up, both through our program and other similar programs. The FAST App will enable parents and families to access resources at home, while they are in the program and after. The information will be easily accessible, actionable, impactful, and readily available. This will allow for deeper program impact, for each family that participates; given that across our partners we support thousands of families each year, the app will have a large reach and great opportunity for improved outcomes for children and families. Families will be able to connect with one another, with school staff, and community members - share their experiences, reduce isolation and toxic stress, all helping to support improved educational outcomes for children.

While we serve thousands of people through the FAST Program, we have not yet started piloting the FAST App. We plan to begin piloting our FAST App in 2 schools each in the US, Brazil, Czech Republic, and Australia. The first year we will serve approximately 1,000 people with our app. Once we have completed initial pilots, conducted reviews, and made adjustments as necessary, looking ahead to 5 years down the road, we aim to serve 13,000 people. We are always working to bring the FAST Program to new communities around the world. The FAST App would become a core part of the program - integrated and available to every family who participates. 

Introducing the App will allow parents to continue to access resources, even after they have completed the program, and access the most up-to-date information, as we will be providing updates as new information and resources become available. Smartphones and apps are a part of everyday life for many people, and harnessing this technology through our program will help best support students in their education by providing resources, connections, and support to them and their families.

The FAST Program has a robust evaluation component that draws feedback from parents, youth, teachers, and FAST Team members to summarize program outcomes and provide guidance on program improvement for the team moving forward. The pilot of our solution will also gather feedback from parents and other users about their experience, the benefit, and the impact, in particular as compared to other parents participating in the program who are NOT using the app. 

In our standard evaluation, we gather data around the goals of the program: building strong family relationships and strengthening parent-child relationships; increasing family engagement at the school and feelings of school connectedness; and reducing stress by building connections among families as well as to community resources. The focus on these goals help paint a broad picture of academic readiness for children as measured by Child Social Competence, parent and school relationship and connections via the Panorama Survey; mental health, as measured by social connectedness, access to resources, and stress levels. 

Overall, we work to support the UN Rights of the Child - having the child be safe, be nurtured, in a predictable environment, and access to high-quality education.

Families & Schools Together is the international headquarters for FAST. We partner with organizations around the world to implement in different communities. There is a robust network of partners, trainers, and families, but the solution team is donating time to work on this application. 11 people are on the team.

At the core of the FAST model is inclusion of families; parents as partners. No program can run if parents are not involved at the leadership level. This is a value that our solution’s team strongly upholds. Each member of the solution team comes with over a decade (most with several decades) of experience in working with families - in the education sector, in supporting child and parent mental health, in helping to create safe and stable environments for youth so they have the best opportunity to learn, and in conducting research at the university level. Our solution’s team includes a FAST Parent Graduate, who is leading the FAST App design. Additionally, we have two people on our team who can provide support/development for the App technology. By including parents as leaders, parents are empowered to make change in their communities - to improve their lives, the lives of their children, and to advocate for their children’s education. The App will help facilitate this leadership development, ensuring sustainable outcomes for children, families, schools and communities. 

Part of the FAST program is ongoing program evaluation. This provides regular opportunities for parents and other stakeholders to provide feedback, to share their experience, and to help guide teams to provide the highest quality programming. This framework will allow us to collect this same level of data about our solution, utilizing focus groups and putting parent voices at the front, so that the FAST App provides all the tools and support parents need.

FAST is dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion at many levels. Our solution’s team includes representation from each of our international partners and each person brings with them their own experiences, background, and areas of expertise. At the core of our FAST Program is representation - always engaging parents as leaders, and ensuring that teams are representative across race, ethnicity, and languages spoken. 

On our solution’s team, we have six different ethnicities, five countries, and five languages-spoken on our team. We have a FAST Parent Graduate, FAST Trainers, FAST Staff, and the FAST Founder. 

In order to advance the mission of equitable classrooms, we will work to ensure that our continued work on the App always puts a diverse group of parents and families at the center, recognizing the inherent and distinct knowledge that they bring to the table, and respecting their time and input as critical and valuable. In our work, we are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion - to building representative teams and working to dismantle systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, and poverty, so that all children have an equitable opportunity to thrive.

We believe participating in Solve will be a great opportunity for our organization. Having participated in a similar program through a local company, Gener8tor, for another product 3 years ago, we recognize the value of the time spent in such a program: to build new connections and increase awareness of our organization, our work, and our solution. We will have the opportunity to receive coaching and support from world-renowned experts at MIT and beyond, as well as opportunities to share ideas and challenges with other organizations working in this field. Furthermore, by participating in a program like Solve, it gives us the chance to spend time charting a path forward for our solution; it can be hard to dedicate time when there are many priorities, but the structure of Solve will help us dedicate the time and energy our idea deserves, to bring it to its full potential.

Our challenges center mainly around awareness and financial limitations. We believe that Solve will be a great opportunity to help us address our barriers and come up with innovative solutions, which will ultimately make our solution, the FAST App, a stronger product. Gaining awareness in the media, through conferences will help spread the word about the work we are doing, and will help us build connections between local funders and local schools, so that programs can be sustainable. We will also seek help around ensuring the app is easily accessible, even for those who are less comfortable with technology.

We would welcome any and all support that would be available through Solve. Financial support and building awareness (product/service distribution) is our biggest need. We know that we have a great program and that our solution, the FAST App, will really help to augment our program impact, but we need support in helping to identify and build new partnerships both for program implementation and financial support. In this manner, financial, public relations, and service distribution go hand-in-hand. We welcome support around our business model, too, so that we can ensure that we have long-term program, solution, and organizational sustainability.

As far as the specifics of our App, we would appreciate support around developing an easily-accessible application. We have many ideas of our own, and very capable people on our team, but welcome any additional support or ideas we may gather from our cohort as well as experts made available. Lastly, we may have questions around legal or regulatory matters - as we plan to operate internationally, we recognize that we will need to negotiate many different regulations across countries, and will additionally want to make sure that we do what is necessary to protect our intellectual property, given that our program is copyrighted.

As stated above, should we be selected, we would like the opportunity to receive support in the above areas. We would greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with MIT faculty, as we know they have a wealth of experience and advice to give. We would appreciate the opportunity to be connected with students or interns for whom we could offer an applied learning experience and in return get additional support on our solution and help with evaluation and pilot follow-up. Connecting with a lawyer or someone who could advise on our legal and regulatory questions would be great.

We very much welcome the opportunity to connect with other Solve participants - both those who might be in our cohort and those from previous cohorts. It is always interesting to connect with other organizations doing important work in our same field. It’s an opportunity for everyone involved to learn, share, and ultimately, create a stronger solution/service/product. Often, you don’t know what you don’t know, so in terms of piloting an app in a new way, for our program, we recognize there will be things we have not considered or thought about - whether they be barriers or strengths. Working with others in the space, as well as experts, will help address any areas where we need more work and thought, and help us identify strengths that we can better harness. We hope we can provide the same support and coaching to others in our cohort, as well, should they be interested.

In the north of Brazil, specifically in the Amazon area, many cities have borders with other countries and for the past years we have seen an increase of refugees coming to Brazil seeking better opportunities. The city of Benjamin Constant is located in the Alto Solimões River Area and receives immigrants from Peru and Colombia and has over 14 indigenous communities. The municipality is responsible for 59 public schools, only 2 of them are in the urban area and 52 within indigenous area. Currently we are helping Benjamin Constant and 9 other cities in the Amazon State to improve their educational system. Logistics around building family relationships and curriculum adaptations are the two greatest challenges they are facing. FAST is a wonderful program to promote social capital within communities; this is a priority concern regarding immigrant families in a new country. We believe the FAST App could be an excellent resource for families in these communities to help them connect to school personnel and other families. Being able to offer a friendly tool like the FAST App, where parents could communicate in their own language, while adapting to the new life would be a tremendous help for them. Considering that language barriers are also a constant factor of families disengagement in the indigenous schools a second pilot would include offering the App in an indigenous language having the program adapted to the indigenous culture with the help of teachers and leaders from those communities.

Like GM, FAST works to create safe and sustainable communities around the world. By engaging the whole family, FAST takes a holistic approach to supporting children’s academic success and general wellbeing. We are able to run our program in any school or community which desires it, and many of the schools that currently run our program are STEM schools. FAST Programs that are run at the STEM schools are engaging teams of teachers and other school staff, community partners, and parents to help build key relationships between schools and families, and among families at the school. The program is equitable and inclusive in its approach, requiring that teams are representative of families served across race, ethnicity, and language spoken. Families that participate in FAST are more likely to volunteer at the school, engage positively with their children’s teachers, and even pursue further education themselves. Our solution, the FAST App, will further integrate technology into the program, allowing parents and children to connect even outside program sessions, and giving opportunities for teacher and parents to connect directly. Research shows the positive impact that family engagement can have on student achievement - better grades, better attendance, positive attitude, etc. We would utilize funds to support our existing STEM schools, and through our partners, expand to run our program, in conjunction with our solution, the FAST App, in additional STEM-focused schools, in order to reach more children and families.

The FAST Program works to help children thrive by connecting families, schools, and communities. We recognize that by providing programming that engages the whole family, outcomes for the child are more sustainable, and furthermore, program outcomes are not just limited to children, but their parents as well. After participating in the FAST Program, parents are more involved at the school, and have more established relationships and friendships with other parents, increasing social capital. Parents and teachers communicate more regularly, parental stress and isolation is diminished, and parents often go back to pursue further education for themselves, as well. Many of the families that participate in FAST are headed by women; in some communities, up to 80% of the families we serve are headed by single women/mothers. By participating in the FAST Program, mothers meet other parents, build relationships with their child’s school, and get connected to needed resources in the community. Furthermore, FAST encourages the whole family to attend. In communities where mothers are typically the ones to communicate with the school or be responsible for their children’s daily needs, by actively engaging fathers in the process, fathers become more engaged in their children’s lives, helping to ease the burden of care on mothers. Overall, the program not only supports children, but their mothers and fathers or other caregivers, as well.

FAST creates safe and sustainable communities around the world. By engaging the whole family, FAST takes a holistic approach to supporting children’s academic success and general wellbeing. We are able to run our program in any school or community which desires it, and many of the schools that currently run our program are STEM schools. FAST Programs that are run at the STEM schools are engaging teams of teachers and other school staff, community partners, and parents to help build key relationships between schools and families, and among families at the school. The program is equitable and inclusive in its approach, requiring that teams are representative of families served across race, ethnicity, and language spoken. Families that participate in FAST are more likely to volunteer at the school, engage positively with their children’s teachers, and even pursue further education themselves. Our solution, the FAST App, will further integrate technology into the program, allowing parents and children to connect even outside program sessions, and giving opportunities for teacher and parents to connect directly, regarding STEM curriculum or other questions. Research shows the positive impact that family engagement can have on student achievement - better grades, better attendance, positive attitude, etc. We would utilize funds to support our existing STEM schools, and through our partners, expand to run our program, in conjunction with our solution, the FAST App, in additional STEM-focused schools, in order to reach more children and families.