ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 26, 1997 TAG: 9702260093
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
Rosana Anderson works with what she calls one of society's most "stigmatized" groups of men.
They are men struggling with life after incarceration, who have trouble finding jobs and problems reconnecting with their communities.
And they are fathers who need help mending broken family ties.
Anderson heads Total Action Against Poverty VA CARES - an acronym for Virginia Community Action Re-Entry System. She has been challenged with helping ex-prisoners re-establish relationships with their children.
In two years, VA CARES has developed two father-oriented initiatives. One is a court-ordered program that helps unemployed or underemployed parents meet their child-support obligations. The second is a fatherhood program, designed to give support, encouragement and insight into fatherhood to men who are having difficulty with parenting after release from prison.
The programs fit squarely into the Virginia Fatherhood Campaign, launched last summer by Gov. George Allen. The campaign is a two-pronged initiative to combat the absence of fathers in children's lives with public service advertisements and with statewide community forums where business, civic, health and religious leaders gather to discuss fatherhood and the development of policies and programs that promote it.
Tuesday, the campaign's fifth "Fatherhood Forum" was held at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center. In attendance was a small group that included two physicians, a school counselor and a state Department of Corrections administrator.
The campaign aims to improve the quality of relationships between fathers and their children, said Matt Buckwalter, campaign director. Its goals are to involve fathers in their families, to keep fathers involved in their children's lives and to improve fathering skills.
The campaign links a wealth of social problems to absent fathers. The campaign promotes reducing crime, welfare dependency, teen-age pregnancy and drug abuse, not with new government programs but "good fathers."
Some statistics the campaign cites include:
* Four out of 10 children in the United States grow up without their birth fathers at home.
* Nationally, girls in single-parent families are 150 percent more likely to become pregnant and have babies out of wedlock than girls from two-parent families.
* Children in single-parent families in the United States are twice as likely as children from two-parent homes to become involved in substance abuse or other health-risk behaviors.
* Nationally, 70 percent of hard-core criminals grew up without fathers.
* Nationally, 72 percent of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers.
The campaign grew out of the Governor's Commission on Citizen Empowerment, a 40-member group appointed in 1994 to build on welfare initiatives enacted by the General Assembly. The commission heard concerns about a welfare system that discouraged fathers' presence in their children's lives and complaints from welfare recipients - the majority of them women - who wanted fathers to take as much responsibility for raising children as mothers do.
Tuesday's forum served as more of a brainstorming and information session than a strategy-development meeting.
"It's a start," Anderson said. "It's an opportunity to promote family and fatherhood, maybe even give recognition to fathers who really try to stay with their families."
LENGTH: Medium: 65 linesby CNB