The mission of ACF’s National Healthy Marriage Initiative is - “To help couples, who have chosen marriage for themselves, gain greater access to marriage education services, on a voluntary basis, where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.”

The mission of CHMC flows from that and could be stated as - “To help couples within California, who have chosen marriage for themselves, gain greater access to marriage education services, on a voluntary basis, where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.”

Our primary strategy is to “birth”, “nurture”, and “develop” all of the marriage-related coalitions that spring up throughout the state.

These coalitions need to be representative of the people of California – across three dimensions:

Geography

Ethnicity and cultures – with strong recognition of cultural variations and sensitivities

Faith expression (or lack thereof)

Faith based, community based and government/social services

All faith expressions encouraged to organize and to participate – to bring Marriage Education back to their own constituents

We are a “Coalition of Coalitions”.

Three characteristics of a successful local Community Healthy Marriage Initiative/Coalition – (“best practices”)

Web-based Community Marriage Resource Center (CMRC)

Strong Community Marriage Policy (CMP)

Localized Marriage Education Leadership Training readily available

The presence of all three of those components creates an environment in which Marriage Education can become readily available and accessible to all members of a community….which fulfills upon our mission.

We wholeheartedly believe in the practice of “spreading of good corn” through:

Replication of “best practices” – a key role of this coalition can be (should be) to develop, identify, and replicate Best Practices within Marriage Education within and between all of the local coalitions within the state

Strong emphasis on program evaluation – so everyone can see “what works and what doesn’t work” – so we know what “good corn” looks like.

Generous sharing of ourselves with other coalition members

Overall summary – the role of a statewide California Healthy Marriages Coalition can be summed up in two words – Service and Empowerment – of the local community marriage coalitions. The strength of the Statewide coalition only comes from the strength of the local (typically county-level) coalitions.