Latest news with #StrengtheningFamiliesProgram
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Natchitoches awarded grant to improve well-being of local families and community
NATCHITOCHES, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – The City of Natchitoches announced that it has been awarded the Strengthening Families Program Grant from The Rapides Foundation. According to a press release, the grant will provide crucial funding to support local programming aimed at improving the well-being of families and children in the Natchitoches area. Mini-golf, maximum entertainment coming to Dark Woods Adventure Park The release added that in partnership with The Coach De Foundation, the City of Natchitoches will implement a skills training program focusing on parenting education, family support, and community-building activities, ensuring families receive the resources they need to succeed and remain strong. The SFP is designed to strengthen family units by providing tools to improve family bonding and parental involvement and reduce behavioral issues and delinquency. 'We are incredibly grateful to The Rapides Foundation for this significant opportunity to better serve the families in Natchitoches,' said De'Andrea Sanders, Founder of the Coach De Foundation. 'This grant will allow us to provide vital programs that promote family stability, strengthen community connections, and improve the overall quality of life for our residents. We are committed to ensuring that our community's families have the support and resources necessary to thrive.' According to the release, the SFP will focus on offering family-centered services emphasizing skill-building in parenting, effective communication, and conflict resolution. These services will be available to families across Natchitoches, and the program is expected to have a lasting, positive impact on the local community. Kindergarteners get garden growing with 'Pea Patch Jig' at NSU E Lab 'The Rapides Foundation, through its investment in the Strengthening Families Program, continues to demonstrate its commitment to enhancing the lives of individuals and families throughout Central Louisiana,' the release stated. 'By empowering families to be stronger, healthier, and more connected, this program will help to foster a more vibrant and sustainable community in Natchitoches.' For more information about the Strengthening Families Program, how to get involved, or to learn about upcoming events and services, please contact Nicole Gray at 318-352-2772 Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Nonprofit born out of son's addiction among first to receive Washington County opioid settlement funds
Jake Lanhart started smoking marijuana when he was 11 or 12 years old. His parents had no idea. When he was 13, he brought a backpack full of pills from his parents' medicine chest — Benadryl, Tylenol, prescription painkillers — to Burnsville Middle School to trade for pot. His parents found out when they got a call from the principal. Paul and Pam Lanhart struggled over the next few years to find resources to help their son, who had also started drinking and using Xanax. 'It was hard,' Pam Lanhart said. 'Some of the treatment centers had a 'tough-love' ideology that didn't align with our values. They were punitive. It was, 'Take their cellphone away.' 'Take the door off their room.' 'Call the police on them.' 'Kick them out of your home.' We were guided to show up very distant, detached. There was nothing restorative.' Pam Lanhart, a certified family recovery consultant, was convinced there had to be other effective approaches 'that didn't propagate the stigma that addiction is a sin or some sort of moral failure,' she said. In 2016, Lanhart founded Thrive Family Recovery Resources. Instead of tough love, Thrive helps families focus on empathy, compassion and collaborative care. The Burnsville-based organization recently received one of Washington County's first grants from its settlement funds from pharmaceutical companies that made and sold opioid painkillers; the money must be used to combat the opioid crisis, including detailed programs and strategies focused on treatment, prevention and harm reduction. The $37,348 grant that Thrive received will support the implementation of two Strengthening Families Program workshops this year in Washington County. The first 12-week program, which starts March 4 at the Grove United Methodist Church in Woodbury, is designed to 'equip parents with actionable solutions that will help improve the parent-child relationship while mitigating harm and reducing negative behaviors in the child,' said Rolando Vera, who is overseeing the opioid settlement process for Washington County Public Health & Environment. 'This is primary prevention,' Vera said. 'This is way upstream. This is before the onset of addiction, before the onset of use.' Thrive is one of eight organizations funded by the county's opioid settlement this year; the county's community council awarded a total of $520,000 to eight community-based projects. Other recipients include: YourPath, ShelettaMakesMeLaugh, WayMakers to Recovery, Wellshare International, Elim Lutheran Church, Change the Outcome and Invisible Wounds Project. RELATED: Washington County officials expect to receive $11.5 million over the next 18 years in opioid-settlement funds. The county is expected to get the majority of its funding in the first five years and then receive 13 years of reduced payments; Vera anticipates the community council will award about $500,000 annually to opioid-mitigation efforts. Jake Lanhart, who was born in 1997, was the third of the Lanharts' four children. He loved tacos, ice cream, 'Napoleon Dynamite' and the Minnesota Vikings. His favorite sports were football, mountain biking, mountain climbing, mixed martial arts and rugby. Jake was always a risk taker and 'rebellious to some degree,' Pam Lanhart said. He would sneak out at night. He got in trouble at school. He was sassy. 'He was one of those kids who was always attracted to the kids who were pushing limits,' she said. 'That was super-frustrating because we were trying to protect him. We even homeschooled him for a while, and he went to a charter school for a while. We were very conscientious about our parenting because we knew we had risk factors.' Addiction was prevalent in their family history, and Pam Lanhart has siblings in recovery. 'In our work, we know that substance use really comes out of some sort of pain,' she said. 'Substances solve a problem in the individual's life. Jake would have said he did not feel like he fit in. He felt different, which is very common with kids that have ADHD or depression or anxiety, or they come from family systems that have had some struggles.' The Lanharts kept Jake active in sports, attended church, had family meals together. The family traveled many times to Colorado together to hike and climb mountains. 'We checked all the good-parenting boxes,' Pam Lanhart said. 'We exposed him to all of the good things that we could. That's sort of the standard protocol for prevention, right? But at the same time, we grew up without communication skills and tools, and we didn't know what we didn't know.' Jake went to treatment for the first time — a 30-day, inpatient program — at the Hazelden Betty Ford Treatment Center for Teens, Young Adults and Families in Plymouth in 2013. He was 15. He was in and out of seven other treatment programs over the next 12 months. 'Those years were a special kind of hell for us,' Pam Lanhart said. When he was 16, Jake ended up in Dakota County Juvenile Treatment Court 'because he thought it would be a really good idea to break into the neighbor's house and look for alcohol and money,' she said. He completed treatment court in March 2015 and then 'limped along, coming in and out of our home,' she said. 'Our home was in constant chaos and constant conflict.' When Jake was 17, the Lanharts had a family counseling session with a pastor. The meeting changed their 'way of being' with Jake, she said. 'Jake was asking to come back home, and this pastor looked at us and said, 'Are you going to be right for the sake of justice, or are you going to love for the sake of relationship?'' she said. 'Oftentimes, we die on the hill of having to be right, having to prove our point, having to confront someone and get them out of denial because they're creating pain in our life. So the question is, 'Are we going to be right or love right?' Loving right is the balance of reinforcing positive behaviors, boundaries and allowing for natural consequences.' For the Lanharts, the boundary setting included not allowing Jake to live with them when he was using. 'We had minor children in the home, and he was bringing substances into the home,' she said. 'At the same time, we created ways to connect with him.' Jake moved out for the first time in June 2015, right before he turned 18. 'He started his senior year not living with us because of his substance use,' she said. 'In October, he came back home, and then was maintaining. I would say his senior year he was struggling, but he was kind of holding it together.' Jake was captain of the rugby team at Burnsville High School. In April of his senior year, he was hit by an opponent and broke his left femur. 'I sat on that field, and I listened to the crack,' she said. 'It was loud, as loud as could be. I listened to his screams, and I saw them pumping fentanyl into his arm, and I'm not even kidding you, I so vividly remember thinking, 'Really, God? This is the way this is going to end?' Because I knew how strong his addiction was in his life. And it didn't happen then, but it did in the end.' RELATED: More treatment programs followed — at least a dozen overall. When Jake started using again around his 20th birthday, the Lanharts again asked him to move out. 'But we did it differently that time,' Pam Lanhart said. 'It was compassionate. It was, 'Son, we love you. We want you well.' We said, 'You get to decide. This is your choice.' Two weeks to the day that he left, he called and asked for treatment. I think a lot of that was because we had changed how we were interacting with him.' Jake ended up going through treatment programs in Arizona and Colorado and had three years in recovery. He ended up living in Lakewood, Colo., at a sober-living house and, later, in an apartment with his girlfriend, Maddy Cadry. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Jake 'really struggled,' Pam Lanhart said. 'He lost his community. He was laid off from his job. He was struggling with his mental health.' Cadry contacted Pam Lanhart on Oct. 22, 2021, to tell her that Jake had relapsed. 'I sent him a note that said, 'Jake, it's not too late to turn this around. You can do it,'' Pam Lanhart said. 'He sent me a text back that just said, 'Yeah, I know. Of course. I don't want to lose everything.'' Around 10:30 that night, Lanhart sent Jake a clip from a Lauren Daigle song called 'Rescue.' 'The lyrics are, 'I will send out an army to find you / In the middle of the darkest night / It's true, I will rescue you,'' she said. 'I said, 'Truth right here. Love you buddy.' That was the last text that I sent him.' Jake died of a fentanyl overdose about four hours later, around 2:30 a.m. Oct. 23, 2021. He was 24. 'Either you get well or you die from this disease,' Pam Lanhart said. 'That's the way it is. There's no in between.' One of her son's last acts was saving a friend's life with naloxone, a medicine used to reverse an opioid overdose, she said. 'That was his last act of complete selflessness. Danny is still alive, and we still have contact with him. But, Jake just thought he was smarter than the addiction, and it wasn't going to catch up with him.' The Lanharts wonder if Jake would still be alive had they been better equipped and had more support when he started using. 'All we were hearing was punishment, tough love, have them hit rock bottom, detach,' she said. 'You feel like it's your fault, and society makes you feel that way, like you're failing as a parent if your kid is smoking marijuana and skipping school. It's a very natural thing to feel like it's a reflection of you when these kinds of problems pop up. … Maybe doing things differently wouldn't have changed things, but I know for sure it would have helped me to not feel so helpless, to feel so hopeless, and to feel so ill-equipped.' What if, Pam Lanhart wonders, they had taken a more curious approach? Health | Nearly everyone in the world breathes bad air. This is what you can do to lower your risk Health | Blood transfusions at the scene save lives. But ambulances are rarely equipped to do them Health | Have recent crashes spiked your flight anxiety? Try these 5 tips to keep calm and fly on Health | This is what happens to the body when HIV drugs are stopped for millions of people Health | House cats with bird flu could pose a risk to public health 'What if we had said, 'I've heard you say that you've tried it, can you say more about that? What was the situation, and what did you get from that? Did you like it?'' she said. 'I think trying to understand and also being aware, with empathy, that there's always a reason why. You know, 'My friends are doing it. I want to chill out. I like the way it makes me feel.' There's always something that it gives them. Had we taken that curious approach early on, perhaps his addiction wouldn't have escalated.' In her grant application to Washington County, Lanhart included a quotation from the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu: 'Why are we pulling people out of the river? Why are we not looking upstream to see why they are going in in the first place?' 'The opposite of addiction is connection,' Lanhart said. 'In our society, we're disconnected. I mean, kids are sitting at home on their phones, on their game consoles, the parents are in their room working on their laptop, and they're not coming together anymore, and we're seeing the correlation between the growth of social media and the growth of apps, and all of the technology is increasing and directly correlated to the increase in substance use.' Strengthening Families, which will be offered in English and Spanish, is designed for children between the ages of 7 and 17 and their parents or guardians. Adults and children will share a meal, separate for age-appropriate lessons and then come back together for a joint session. Topics covered will include: How do you create routines in the family? How do you create rituals that are fun and collaborative? How do you communicate? How do you have hard conversations? How do you reinforce and look for positive behaviors that you can reward and reinforce? Each family unit will be given at-home assignments that they have to work on together throughout the week. Among the assignments: having a family meeting once a week, eating a meal together five to six times a week, and having 10 minutes each day of individual parent-child time, which Lanhart calls 'my time.' 'If you're a mom with three kids, the expectation is you're going to spend 10 minutes with each child every day to connect with them individually,' Lanhart said. 'There's a saying, 'Nobody will care how much you know unless they know how much you care,' so unless the parents are creating a positive, safe environment in the family, children are going to look for that safety elsewhere.' Establishing routines is key, Lanhart said. 'A lot of families, everything is so chaotic,' she said. 'You're going here, and you're going there, and you're running around … and so there's no real peace in the routine of the family. One of the things that I know about substance use is that every negative behavior is a need to feel safe. So when I feel unsafe, whether it's anxiety or fear, or I don't feel like I fit in with my friends or my family, or my home life is scary, I can smoke a joint, and then I'll feel safe. It solves a problem for me, right? So once it works, then I'm going to repeat that because it's working for me.' The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in 2023, more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, with 69 percent of those deaths related to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Drug traffickers mix fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic that is 10 times more powerful than other opioids, with other illicit drugs in an effort to drive addiction and attract repeat buyers, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 2023, the United States suffered nearly as many fentanyl-related deaths as gun- and auto-related deaths combined, according to the CDC. 'We want to prevent harm, and we want to prevent death — because dead people don't have the opportunity to get well,' Lanhart said. The Lanharts keep a shadow box in the dining room of their home with a collection of Jake's treasures: the hospital wristband from the day he was born; his blue kazoo; a $2 bill that he kept in his wallet; carabiners he used while climbing mountains; a collection of his Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous medallions; and a small wooden spoon that was made for him at a treatment center in Utah that, according to Native American practice, was to be filled with 'all the things that you need that are good,' she said. 'All the good.' One of her favorite pictures of Jake was taken in 2020 at the base of Mount Harvard in the Sawatch Range in Colorado. It's one of the state's 58 mountain peaks that exceed 14,000 feet — they're known as '14ers' or 'fourteeners.' Jake Lanhart climbed 18 of them. He worked as a guide for Wild Hearts Adventures, a nonprofit organization founded by his father, Paul, that is devoted to helping people find spiritual renewal through wilderness exploration. 'Summiting 14ers was part of his recovery,' Paul Lanhart said. 'He told us that he felt closest to God when he was on a mountain.' Now, his parents and siblings are on a mission — #58forJake — to finish the rest. They have climbed 34 14ers to date and plan to climb another four or five this summer. Health | Woodbury's Math and Science Academy adding elementary school, building new high school Health | Woodbury teen killed in Washington County crash Friday afternoon Health | NY police find body of missing man from MN they say was tortured for more than a month Health | Cottage Grove garden center owner put on probation after admitting to tax crime Health | Stillwater business owner pleads guilty to tax evasion, will pay state $70K 'We went through all this chaos, but at the end of it, we were really connected and enjoying life together,' Pam Lanhart said. 'I can't control outcomes, but I can sleep at night because I know that I did my best, and I showed up the way I wanted to. Even though things played out the way they did, I don't look back with any regrets because I have those last texts. I can go to bed at night knowing that we loved our son well.' One of her other favorite photos of Jake was taken when he was 13 or 14 – 'before his addiction really took hold of his life,' she said. In the photo, he's outside in the sunshine at Whitewater State Park in southern Minnesota, smiling and laughing. 'Through all of his trials, this was really who he was,' she said. 'You never saw him without a smile. He was just so playful and lively and just so completely full of life. So these are the pieces of him that we remember and that we honor in all the work that we do.' The first of Thrive Family Recovery Resources' Strengthening Families programs in Washington County starts March 4 at the Grove United Methodist Church in Woodbury. The 12-week program, designed for children 7-17 and their parents or caregivers, is free. Dinner and child care are provided. To register, go to For more information, call 763-290-0098.
