(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
by Jim Brown
A pro-family group in Washington state is gearing up to launch a long-term cultural program to strengthen marriage and family life.
If February, Families Northwest will officially kick off a new ten-year campaign to improve marriage success and the health of family relationships. The “Northwest Marriage and Family Movement” will seek to turn the tide in the divorce culture and recreate it into a marriage culture.
Jason Krafsky is director of community strategies for Families Northwest. He says the idea is to saturate communities with an array of resources to help improve relationships and ensure that they succeed.
“This program is helping to equip communities and community leaders to be offering a lot more services, a lot more resources to the general public,” he explains. “So couples and communities should be experiencing more and more opportunities to tap into things, whether it's their church, whether it's at the hospital, whether it's through the schools, whether it's through the social service agencies.”
Krafsky says the “Northwest Marriage and Families Movement” was birthed out of the growing need for positive solutions to family breakdown. “As we were working with [about two dozen] individual communities all over the State of Washington … it just became more and more apparent [that] we needed to do something to get the public conversation going in the direction of … talking about marriage, about healthy relationships, [and] about healthy family life,” he says.
Krafsky says the ultimate goal of the campaign is for Washington to become the state with the highest rate of marriage, lowest rate of divorce, and highest rate of people who value their marriage as a positive relationship in their life.
The program will include conflict resolution and communications workshops, as well as resources on overcoming the pains of adultery and sexual addiction.
