First 5 Nevada Family Leadership Council
Elevating Family Voices in Nevada
Thank you for your interest in creating authentic opportunities for Family Leaders to participate in your work!
Family Leadership helps strengthen families, promotes children to be successful and creates positive changes in the systems that serve and support children and families.
When systems value lived experience, they create better outcomes for everyone.
What is Parent Leadership?
According to ParentLeadership.org, Family and Parent Leadership is a set of intentional practices and values adopted by organizations to ensure parents can influence systemic decisions.
By integrating Family Leaders into advisory bodies, agencies move beyond simple “outreach” and toward true partnership. This shift is crucial because it:
Elevates Lived Experience: Family leaders bring unique first-hand perspectives that data alone cannot capture.
- Refines Decision-Making: Input from families ensures programs are responsive, practical, and effective.
- Strengthens Community: Authentic inclusion builds trust and fosters stronger ties between agencies and the people they serve.
- Promotes Success: Valuing family voices leads to more comprehensive support systems for Nevada’s children.
Resources for Authentic Engagement
The First 5 Nevada Family Leadership Council (F5N FLC) believes that meaningful engagement is the key to shaping our state’s future. To support your organization in this journey, we have developed two essential tools:
The Facilitation Rubric – A versatile tool used to evaluate how well a facilitator creates space for families to participate in conversation and decision-making.
The Companion Guide – A supplemental guide designed to help facilitators grow their skills in leading inclusive meetings with family leaders.
Note: While originally designed for the Nevada Early Childhood Advisory Council, these tools are easily adaptable for any advisory body or organization.
Including Family Leaders in early childhood decision making in Nevada ensures that programs and policies reflect the real-life experiences of parents and caregivers with young children. Partnering with families amplifies their voices, making initiatives more effective, culturally responsive, and genuinely aligned with community needs.making in Nevada ensures that programs and policies reflect the real-life experiences of parents and caregivers with young children. Partnering with families amplifies their voices, making initiatives more effective, culturally responsive, and genuinely aligned with community needs.
Family Leaders are catalysts for lasting systems change, advocating for mental health supports, access to early intervention, fair funding, and culturally competent care. Serving in these roles also empowers family leaders, providing leadership opportunities that build valuable skills, confidence, and engagement.
FAQs about the First 5 Nevada Family Leadership Council
Is the Facilitation Rubric something I can use with my Advisory Board?
Yes! The Facilitation Rubric can be used by Advisory Boards and Organizations looking to grow family leadership opportunities within their purview. You are free to individualize based on your program’s needs. It is recommended that you have the advisory facilitators review the rubric before you begin using it. Let them know that this is a process and that it will take time.
What are the different “competencies” used in the Rubric?
The Facilitation Rubric covers 9 Competencies: Communication, Listening, Creating Safe Spaces, Managing the Group Decision Process, Advance Preparation, Flexibility and Adaptability, Respectful Interactions, Access, Inclusion and Opportunities for All & Time Management.
What was the process for creating the Rubric? Is it a “reliable” tool?
The original Facilitation Rubric was used by The Children’s Cabinet Family Leadership Team during meetings of the Nevada’s Early Childhood Advisory Council. Multiple users over a period of time utilizing the Rubric and conducted in formal “reliability” checks to ensure the Rubric was being used consistently, and interpreting descriptions in a unified way. However, to ensure that the Rubric is used consistently across the early childhood sectors, we recommend practicing using the Rubric as a team to ensure the competencies are clearly understood by Rubric users and those being observed.
Do I need to be trained to use the Facilitation Rubric?
It is ideal to be provided with support by The Children’s Cabinet Family Leadership team to understand how to use the Rubric when observing meetings. However, the Companion Guide was created to support your use of Rubric on your own! Feel free to reach out if you would like more information by using the contact form below.
I’ve read the Companion Guide and am familiar with the Facilitation Rubric, now what?
During your next meeting where families are invited (or in any case where the meeting is utilizing Open Meeting Law and members of the public are in attendance) take notes on the Facilitator’s competencies as the meeting progresses. It’s recommended to review your notes after the meeting and then assign “scores.”
The meeting is over, I scored the Facilitator, now what?
We recommend sharing the findings with the meeting Facilitator. Ideally, they would have an awareness of the Facilitation Rubric AND the Companion Guide before the meeting, however, if this was not done it’s a good idea to share the documents with the results of the Facilitation Rubric. Encourage meeting facilitators to ask questions and access additional resources if they wish to increase their skills encouraging and engaging with Family Leaders!
Do you have any tips and tricks for us?
Nothing in addition to those included in the Companion Guide, however, The Children’s Cabinet Team created an internal Microsoft Form with the Facilitation Rubric questions so that users across the state could enter their scores and notes in a single spot. This enabled us to keep a history of each meeting and facilitator scores. It also enabled us to pull data across meeting settings and facilitators to show growth in overall scores and individual competencies.
How long should you use the rubric?
You can continue using the rubric for as long as it supports progress toward creating a welcoming environment for families. This work takes time, and meaningful change is a gradual process. Ideally, both advisory board facilitators and families receive some form of training or support, so everyone can come together to these meetings with shared understanding and expectations.
Empowering the Next Generation of Leaders
The F5N FLC doesn’t just support organizations; we support families, too! We provide training and resources necessary for Nevada’s parents to grow into confident leaders.
In addition to the above resources, we encourage you to contact us!
Resources
National Center for Family and Parent Leadership – Our Beliefs — National Center for Family Parent Leadership / National-Center-for-FPL-Overview-2-1.pdf
Water of Systems Change The Water of Systems Change – FSG
