Brief History

Maryland's Friends of the Family and the network of Family Support Centers represent the pursuit of a vision. The first four Family Support Centers and Friends of the Family were established in 1986, after a group of parents, State and local leaders, child care and adolescent pregnancy advocates, child development specialists, and leaders in the foundation community had met and planned for nearly two years. The group was searching for a better way to address some of the State's most pressing social problems and to put in place a prevention mechanism, a front end, to the State's crisis-oriented human services delivery system.

The specific catalysts for the effort were the State's skyrocketing reports of child abuse and neglect and resulting foster care placements, its high teenage pregnancy rate, and growing recognition of the relationships between adolescent parenting and long-term welfare dependency; limited success in education and job attainment; and negative outcomes for the children of teenagers.

Since its beginning, the network's goal has been to provide comprehensive, culturally-sensitive, community-based, preventive services to families who live in neighborhoods that show high concentrations of a variety of risk factors known to be predictive of long-term welfare dependency and poverty.