HISTORY OF THE HEALTHY MARRIAGE PROJECT

In 2003, our founder, Carolyn Rich Curtis, attended the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Educator’s conference, Smart Marriages in Reno, Nevada. She attended this conference for the purpose of obtaining continuing education units for her marriage and family therapy license and hearing nationally renowned speakers on couple’s therapy. What happened instead was that she heard tales of how communities were organizing and reducing their divorce rates. Modesto over twenty years reduced their divorce rate by 50% and El Paso Texas by 89%. Carolyn returned home so excited that she was unable to sleep for days. She began to think that she was wasting her time seeing couples one at a time, when she could change her entire community.

The model being taught at Smart Marriages was to work through the Faith Based Community, so Carolyn began working with her own church. Little did she realize that the Dean of her church, Don Brown, was a community leader who had supported the start of many community based organizations. Dean Brown provided major support for HMP’s beginning efforts. He offered letters of introduction to other faith based leaders in the community. From these introductions, HMP began its Honorary Advisory Board with Faith Based Leaders from most of the major Christian denominations as well as Jewish and Muslim congregations. With an introduction to and the support of Jerry Lamb, then Bishop of the Northern California Episcopal Diocese, began under the umbrella of Episcopal Community Services which gave HMP immediate 501 (c) (3) status.

Carolyn began recruiting students and community volunteers to begin a community wide effort to improve relationships all over Sacramento County. She began by accumulating community statistics regarding marriages and divorces, percentages of single parents, percentage of divorced persons in Sacramento County. Then, the entire group of volunteers called every church, synagogue and mosque in Sacramento County asking if they offered a marriage ministry, relationship education to members of their congregation. If the answer was yes, then we followed up with asking if they would like their program listed on our website. If the answer was no, we asked if they were interested in starting one. We called over 500 organizations, and 80 organizations indicated that they were interested in working with us.

We planned a “Kick Off” event for March, 2004, and asked all of those interested in starting a marriage-relationship education program to attend. Twenty four people attended this event. Upon the recommendation of a church pastor who reported that they tried to start marriage programs at their church and no one from their church attended, HMP decided to start with promoting “10 Great Dates.” Here was a program that no one had to admit they had a problem and was fun. To create a community wide event, all organizations were to start 10 Great Dates in the spring of 2005.

By the spring, 2005, fifteen churches committed to starting 10 Great Dates. For 15 churches to all so something at the same time is news worthy. So the Sacrament Bee featured HMP in an article on the front page of the Scene Section. From this exposure 25 other churches decided to host 10 Great Dates. As a result of this campaign, 400 couples participated in 10 Great Dates in the first year of operation.

2005 was an active year. We established a board of Directors with Wendy Phoenix taking on the challenging job of President of this fledgling board. Several other dedicated volunteers took on the massive effort it took to create this organization: Berryl Michaels, Beth Hassett, Esther Castillo, Quennon Coleman…. Being that we had no funding, our board members served important roles in the success of the organization: grant writing, donation, recruitment for classes, starting Black Marriage Day. Steve Polanski, M.D., became HMP’s first major donor by providing funding to hire a grant writer to sustain our organization.

HMP received its first grant of $50,000 from the Federal Compassion Capital Fund. With this capacity building grant, HMP received its own 501 (c) (3) designation and began laying the foundation for the infrastructure necessary for a successful organization.
During this period, Carolyn became a trainer of facilitators in three major relationship education curricula: Relationship Enhancement, PAIRS and Bringing Baby Home. This allowed HMP to become self sufficient in providing training of relationship educators through out our area. This training became possible through a grant from Presbyterian Sierra Mission Partnership. HMP expanded its offerings from 10 Great Dates, to Relationship Enhancement and for singles PICK a Partner.

Beginning in 2006, HMP received major funding from the Administration of Children and Families, Healthy Marriage Demonstration Grant to provide relationship education for low income, pregnant, unwed couples or couples with an infant. In 2007, we started our first class teaching couples how to build a healthy family. We continue expand our out reach to our community with a Marriage Summit.