Oak Foundation grant awarded to Dr Jamie Lachman, Professor Lucie Cluver and Professor Cathy Ward

 The Department of Social Policy and Intervention is pleased to announce the establishment of a new research initiative – the Global Parenting Initiative – thanks to a major grant from the Oak Foundation. 

The Global Parenting Initiative aims to provide families around the world with the tools, knowledge, and support they need to cope with stress, improve parenting, and reduce violence against children. Through this process, the initiative is generating a powerful showcase of national-level results, leading to sustainable and embedded parenting support by 2026. By achieving this, the collaboration can overcome setbacks posed by COVID-19 and accelerate progress across a range of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The three goals of the initiative will be to:

• Protect children and adolescents from sexual, physical and emotional violence, and support families to cope with multiple stressors, including those resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,
• Enable parents to nurture their children’s development across the life course, in the context of reduced child-related services and increased parental responsibilities, and
• And lay the foundation for mainstreaming the wide-spread uptake and implementation of evidence-based parent and caregiver support approaches in all countries.

In response to being awarded the grant, Dr Jamie Lachman said:

We are thrilled to have the support of the Oak Foundation to expand our ground-breaking research-within-implementation studies focused on scaling up playful parenting interventions to reduce child sexual abuse and exploitation in the Global South.

The Global Parenting Initiative team is in discussions with the LEGO Foundation and The Human Safety Net about further expanding this ambitious project. Together, they hope to achieve their ultimate aim of providing free, evidence-based parenting support to every parent, everywhere, so that they are equipped with the knowledge and tools to protect their children from sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.