Track A: Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood

1. Strengthening Families - Connecting Fathers
This is an interactive session to stimulate dialogue about research and practice on emerging father-centered initiatives. Topics include the promotion of coalition building, motivational methods used by organizations to connect fathers to the family, development of partnerships with faith based/marriage programs, healing of families in the promotion of healthy relationships, and getting fathers involved in their children's lives.

2. How to Keep the Fire Burning in Your Marriage
This session examines the research and provides successful tips to keep the fire burning in your marriage. Effective marriage education techniques will be shared, including developing relationship intelligence, building trust, healing from hurt, and enhancing intimacy to establish and maintain effective communication in marriage.

3. Supporting Young Families: Understanding Young Fathers
Presenters discuss what research and practice tell us about how young fathers view fatherhood. This session highlights various patterns of successful fatherhood among young fathers and seeks to answer how young men integrate fatherhood into their overall identify. What are the hopes and aspirations that young fathers have for the future and where/how does marriage fit?

4.Boys Into Men: Raising Our African American Teenage Sons
This session reviews the challenges of helping young black men overcome racism, deal with sexual responsibility, understand the need for a good education, avoid drugs, alcohol abuse, and use cultural and spiritual strengths as a foundation for success.

5. Overcoming Trends In African American Family Formation
This discussion will evolve around understanding how the changing role and social functions of the African American family in society has had an effect on policy and practice strategies. Presenters will address the changes and how the policy/practices are being developed and implemented to either address or not address those changes..