CYFAR Professional Development Event 2025

This message is personal. In Fight Till the End, Dr. Gardner shares his lived experience growing up as a young boy without a roadmap, navigating pain, identity, and purpose. Through real talk, reflection, and a few laughs along the way, this keynote challenges you to look inward and commit to pushing forward—even when life hits back. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about persistence.

Learn strategies for identifying, communicating with, and mobilizing key stakeholders to support program goals. This session will focus on the importance meaningful relationships from program success and sustainability.  

In this presentation, we will outline our experience with the Familias Activas program since its inception. We will also discuss essential subjects that can determine its success, such as the program's goal and why we are undertaking this initiative, our target audience, how we tailored our program to meet their needs, and how the program adapts and evolves.

The University Of Arizona--Reducing Family Stress Sustainable Community Project uses a two-generation approach and multi-faceted program model to facilitate positive parent-child interactions and the emotional and financial wellbeing of the family. This program runs 4 to 6 8-week sessions a year, serving two Arizona communities with family-centered, intergenerational, and community-engaged programming with an emphasis on: positive parenting of teens, financial literacy/parenting, youth financial education, and community connectedness. The evaluation is led by the Community Research, Evaluation & Development (CRED) team, a UA resource, but supported by the entire CYFAR team. Evaluation of this program includes weekly formative evaluation and quality improvement, baseline and follow up surveys for adult and youth participants focused on topical content (e.g., financial literacy and family communication), as well as the CYFAR common measures. Additionally, we conduct a post-completion follow-up survey to see if the skills and knowledge addressed in the class are having a lingering effect. In this session, we’ll detail how the entire team works together to support evaluation, explain how we use technological tools to facilitate data collection, and highlight some of our findings.

In this interactive panel, hear about the importance of strong partnerships, consistent communication, and using data to tell your CYFAR story from a wide variety of contexts.