Change Collective KY gives parents a place

Kentucky has orga­ni­za­tions focused on chil­dren, youth, fam­i­lies, care­givers, schools, health and social services.

Valerie Frost believes the state also needs a place will­ing to name anoth­er group direct­ly: Parents.

That belief is at the cen­ter of Change Collective KY, an inde­pen­dent, par­ent-led orga­ni­za­tion Frost found­ed in Winchester to help Kentucky par­ents under­stand com­pli­cat­ed sys­tems, find prac­ti­cal sup­port and make sure their expe­ri­ences are tak­en seriously.

“Parents mat­ter,” Frost said. “That shouldn’t be a con­tro­ver­sial thing to say.”

A moth­er of three, for­mer edu­ca­tor and bira­cial woman who has expe­ri­enced sys­temic bar­ri­ers first­hand, Frost spent years work­ing inside child‑, youth- and fam­i­ly-serv­ing orga­ni­za­tions and came to believe par­ent-cen­tered work too often hits a ceil­ing when par­ents are not treat­ed as a con­stituen­cy in their own right. That real­iza­tion ulti­mate­ly led her to build a sep­a­rate, par­ent-led orga­ni­za­tion where sup­port­ing par­ents would not be sec­ondary to anoth­er insti­tu­tion­al mission.

Frost kept see­ing the same problem.

Parents inter­act dai­ly with insti­tu­tions that can pro­found­ly affect their fam­i­lies: schools, health care sys­tems, child sup­port agen­cies, courts, law enforce­ment, CPS and DCBS, dis­abil­i­ty ser­vices, men­tal health providers and oth­er pub­lic and com­mu­ni­ty systems.

When some­thing works well, fam­i­lies know it. When some­thing does not, they know that too. But there are few inde­pen­dent places for those expe­ri­ences to go.

Where does a family’s experience go?

Frost some­times explains the gap by com­par­ing it to the con­sumer world. If some­one has a seri­ous prob­lem with a busi­ness, there are famil­iar ways to doc­u­ment the expe­ri­ence out­side of the com­pa­ny itself. Consumers can leave reviews, file com­plaints or use orga­ni­za­tions such as the Better Business Bureau.

Families nav­i­gat­ing pub­lic sys­tems often have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. A par­ent who has a con­cern about a school may be direct­ed back through the school dis­trict. Someone frus­trat­ed with a health care expe­ri­ence may com­plete a hos­pi­tal sur­vey. A fam­i­ly involved with CPS may raise con­cerns through agency channels.

A per­son nav­i­gat­ing court, child sup­port or anoth­er pub­lic sys­tem may find that the avail­able com­plaint process ulti­mate­ly cir­cles back through the insti­tu­tion itself.

Those process­es can serve a pur­pose. But Frost sees a gap when the insti­tu­tion receiv­ing the feed­back is also the insti­tu­tion decid­ing what the feed­back means, whether it rep­re­sents a larg­er prob­lem and what hap­pens to it next.

And when par­ents feel they have exhaust­ed those chan­nels with­out being heard, their frus­tra­tion often ends up some­where else: Facebook groups, TikTok videos, neigh­bor­hood pages or posts writ­ten in anger after a dif­fi­cult experience.

Those sto­ries may be real and impor­tant. But online, they can eas­i­ly be dis­missed as one angry par­ent, one bad expe­ri­ence or one side of a com­pli­cat­ed situation.

Change Collective KY is try­ing to cre­ate anoth­er option.

Turning individual experiences into patterns

The Change Collective KY web­site includes a fam­i­ly expe­ri­ence intake tool where par­ents and care­givers can vol­un­tar­i­ly doc­u­ment what hap­pened to them while inter­act­ing with a sys­tem or service.

It is not a place for Change Collective to deter­mine who was right or wrong. It does not replace a com­plaint, appeal, attor­ney, court process or emer­gency ser­vice. Instead, the pur­pose is much sim­pler: to look for patterns.

One par­ent say­ing she could not fig­ure out how to get help at her child’s school may appear to be one frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence. If 20 par­ents describe the same prob­lem, some­thing dif­fer­ent begins to emerge.

One fam­i­ly say­ing they nev­er under­stood what CPS was ask­ing them to do may be dis­missed as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lem. If fam­i­lies across coun­ties repeat­ed­ly describe the same con­fu­sion, that is infor­ma­tion a com­mu­ni­ty should prob­a­bly know.

The same could be true when fam­i­lies describe bar­ri­ers in health­care, child sup­port, law enforce­ment, dis­abil­i­ty ser­vices, courts or oth­er sys­tems. In research, per­son­al expe­ri­ences like these are often called qual­i­ta­tive data.

Frost prefers a sim­pler explanation.

“They’re sto­ries,” she said. “They’re what hap­pened to peo­ple. And when you col­lect them in a struc­tured way, you can start see­ing whether the same things are hap­pen­ing to fam­i­ly after family.”

Families choose whether to par­tic­i­pate through a con­sent process. Change Collective KY plans to review expe­ri­ences in the aggre­gate, rather than pub­licly iden­ti­fy­ing indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies, in part­ner­ship with the University of Kentucky.

That uni­ver­si­ty part­ner­ship adds research sup­port and addi­tion­al atten­tion to pri­va­cy while allow­ing recur­ring expe­ri­ences to be exam­ined across fam­i­lies rather than treat­ing each one as an iso­lat­ed complaint.

The goal is not to pub­lish a list of griev­ances. Rather, it is to under­stand what fam­i­lies are experiencing.

Frost describes the prin­ci­ple behind it this way: com­mu­ni­ty nar­ra­tive should stay with community.

Why “independent” matters

Change Collective KY inten­tion­al­ly describes itself as inde­pen­dent. That does not mean the orga­ni­za­tion will not work with insti­tu­tions. In fact, Frost expects the opposite.

Change Collective may part­ner with schools, uni­ver­si­ties, ser­vice providers, agen­cies, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions, researchers and oth­er deci­sion-mak­ers. But part­ner­ship does not change who the orga­ni­za­tion exists to serve.

“Our loy­al­ty remains with com­mu­ni­ty,” Frost said.

For Frost, inde­pen­dence means Change Collective KY does not have to pro­tect an institution’s rep­u­ta­tion by min­i­miz­ing an uncom­fort­able fam­i­ly expe­ri­ence. It does not have to make an orga­ni­za­tion look suc­cess­ful by high­light­ing only the sto­ries that reflect well on it. And it does not have to erase dif­fi­cult feed­back in order to pre­serve a partnership.

An agency or orga­ni­za­tion may be doing impor­tant work while fam­i­lies are still expe­ri­enc­ing real bar­ri­ers with­in it, and both things can be true. Frost believes mean­ing­ful part­ner­ship requires enough hon­esty to acknowl­edge both.

Change Collective KY wants to be able to “sit at the table” with insti­tu­tions while remain­ing account­able to the par­ents whose expe­ri­ences brought it there.

Practical help families can use now

The orga­ni­za­tion is not only col­lect­ing expe­ri­ences. Change Collective KY also pro­vides prac­ti­cal, plain-lan­guage infor­ma­tion for par­ents try­ing to fig­ure out what to do next.

Its grow­ing Parent Real Talk Resource Library includes videos, hand­outs and graph­ics on sub­jects includ­ing school advo­ca­cy, spe­cial edu­ca­tion and dis­abil­i­ty sup­ports, CPS and DCBS nav­i­ga­tion, fam­i­ly safe­ty and car-seat safe­ty. The resources are avail­able online whether or not a par­ent attends a live event.

The idea is to meet par­ents clos­er to the moment when a ques­tion actu­al­ly arises.

A par­ent should be able to won­der, What is a 504 plan? Who do I con­tact at school? What hap­pens when CPS calls? What should I doc­u­ment? Where can I find help? and have some­where to begin with­out first need­ing to under­stand pro­fes­sion­al terminology.

Change Collective has also begun test­ing that approach in person.

In August, the orga­ni­za­tion part­nered with All Voices Reading Room in Winchester for Back-to-School Together, an event that gave par­ents prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about school sup­ports, ask­ing ques­tions, doc­u­ment­ing con­cerns and find­ing resources while chil­dren par­tic­i­pat­ed in their own activities.

Frost is now in con­ver­sa­tion with The Nest in Lexington about anoth­er kind of par­ent education.

The con­cept is inten­tion­al­ly dif­fer­ent from what many peo­ple pic­ture when they hear “par­ent­ing class.”

Rather than begin­ning with the assump­tion that par­ents need some­one to teach them how to par­ent cor­rect­ly, Frost is inter­est­ed in down-to-earth con­ver­sa­tions about the every­day real­i­ties of rais­ing chil­dren, includ­ing stress, schools, behav­ior, safe­ty, resources, nav­i­gat­ing sys­tems and what to do when you sim­ply do not know what to do.

In oth­er words, she wants par­ent edu­ca­tion that feels more like use­ful com­mu­ni­ty con­ver­sa­tion and less like remediation.

A place that says “parent” proudly

Change Collective KY is begin­ning local­ly, but Vaelrie Frost sees the need as much big­ger than Winchester. She is proud to bring to Kentucky some­thing she says she spent years wish­ing exist­ed here: a ded­i­cat­ed, unapolo­getic space for parents.

Frost is care­ful about what that does and does not mean. Centering par­ents does not mean choos­ing adults over children.

“We can cen­ter children’s safe­ty and well-being with­out treat­ing par­ents as an after­thought,” Frost said.

Parents are the peo­ple sched­ul­ing appoint­ments, answer­ing school emails, mak­ing meals, arrang­ing trans­porta­tion, com­plet­ing paper­work, nav­i­gat­ing insur­ance, com­mu­ni­cat­ing with teach­ers, man­ag­ing crises and fig­ur­ing out unfa­mil­iar sys­tems while con­tin­u­ing to raise their children.

Yet par­ents them­selves can dis­ap­pear inside lan­guage about chil­dren, youth, fam­i­lies, rel­a­tives and care­givers. Frost wants Change Collective KY to resist that, not because those oth­er groups mat­ter less, but because par­ents mat­ter too.

Families already have voices

The long-term vision brings the dif­fer­ent parts of Change Collective together. 

A par­ent may find the orga­ni­za­tion because they need help under­stand­ing some­thing hap­pen­ing at school. Another may use a Parent Real Talk resource. Another may come to a com­mu­ni­ty event. Another may choose to doc­u­ment an expe­ri­ence with CPS, health­care, court, law enforce­ment or anoth­er sys­tem through the intake tool.

Over time, those indi­vid­ual inter­ac­tions can begin to show a larg­er pic­ture of what Kentucky fam­i­lies are experiencing.

And those pat­terns can be brought back into con­ver­sa­tions with researchers, ser­vice providers, fun­ders, agen­cies and deci­sion­mak­ers with­out requir­ing those insti­tu­tions to be the only ones col­lect­ing, inter­pret­ing and telling the story.

“We hear a lot about giv­ing fam­i­lies a voice,” Frost said. “Families already have voic­es. The ques­tion is whether we have built any­thing that gives those voic­es weight.”

Change Collective KY is Frost’s attempt to build some of that infra­struc­ture: a place where par­ents can ask ques­tions, learn, doc­u­ment what hap­pened, con­nect with oth­ers and see their expe­ri­ences car­ry weight beyond a sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion, sur­vey or complaint.

And, per­haps most impor­tant­ly, it is a place will­ing to say plain­ly who it is for.

Parents.

Families, part­ners and com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions can learn more at changecollectiveky.org.