About Us

What is a Hui

Hui (hoo’ee) is a Hawaiian term for a cooperative group working together for a shared purpose – in this case, developing and supporting healthy families and communities.

Family Hui organizes groups – or hui – of 6-10 families with children ages 0-5 and supports each participating by providing:

• Trauma-informed, resilience-focused parenting curriculum
• An enhanced understanding of the ages and stages of child development in the first five years of life
• Resilience-building activities to enhance parent, child and family resilience
• Connection to other parents and services to build a strong support community
• Leadership training for peer facilitators and opportunities for parents to recognize their role as leaders in their families.

Family Hui

Family Hui (pronounced hoo’-eee) is a resilience-focused, peer-led parenting program built around the Strengthening Families Five Protective Factors, understanding the impact of PACEs (Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences) and incorporating the importance of developing the resilience of parents, caregiver and children. Family Hui emphasizes the importance of meeting the needs of parents and caregivers with children from birth to five years old, as more than 85% of brain development occurs during the first five years of life.

The Family Hui program is designed to encourage and empower parents/caregivers as they face the joys and challenges of raising children, learning how to address the challenges and any stress in healthy ways.

The program builds and expands on the very successful Hawai’i based Baby Hui program, which served Hawai’i’s families for over 30 years. Building on the legacy of the Baby Hui program, Lead4Tomorrow updated the program materials, expanded the program to serve families with children 0-5, and re-imagined the program to focus more on family life as children grow to school age.

Lead4Tomorrow brought the Family Hui program from operations in Hawai’i to California in 2014 with funding from First5 Yolo. We connected with ACEs Connection Network and recognized the need to introduce educational components on trauma and resilience into our work. In 2015, First5 Yolo again stepped up and funded a grant to revise our Family Hui curriculum to  focus on building resilience to counter  the effects of trauma on brain development and on one’s own parenting choices, actions, and reactions. This funding resulted in modifying our original  curriculum to encourage the parents to bloom and grow with their children. Our curriculum is in English and Spanish and we conduct programming in Farsi/Dari and Arabic, as well. For our work in Eastern Africa, our curriculum is translated in Swahili and Kinyarwandan.

With the focus on early childhood development activities are designed to encourage parents to reflect on their own childhood, dreams, trauma, and triggers. We combine evidence-based research, reflective inquiry, and peer-led conversations to create circles of support. Family Hui does not present information in a classroom format – rather, each hui is built around building a community of trust and mutual trust. It is our intent that hui participants stay connected beyond the 12 weeks of programming to create friendships and support one another throughout their lives. Helping parents/caregivers, and their children, develop resilience, regardless of the trauma they have experienced in their lives, is a major element of our programming.

In California, Family Hui is working with partners throughout the state, including Colusa, Imperial, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and Yolo Counties.

We greatly appreciate our partnership with the Office of Child Abuse Prevention which has funded the expansion of Family Hui throughout California. We are also thankful for partnerships with several First 5 Commission’s around the state, particularly First 5 Sacramento and First 5 Yolo which have funded much of our work. We greatly value our partnership with the UC Davis Center for Healthcare Policy and Research on their Koa Family research initiative studying approaches to overall health and well-being for women.

And most recently, we are grateful for a statewide partnership with Health Net on an initiative which integrates our Family Hui and Community Leadership programs to support various ways parents and caregivers can advocate for their children and families.

We are committed to the belief that parents and caregivers want the best for their children. We have designed Family Hui to provide support for each participating family to realize the joys of raising their children through the first five years of life, while addressing the challenges in healthy, positive ways for both their children and themselves.