Tag Archives: In English

Open Access to Parent Education and Family Support – a Model for Argentina and South America?

The international conference of women of the Mother Centers in Argentina, where we
could exchange experiences and knowledge of the long-standing work at the Mother
Centers across the ocean – has been a two-year old dream, which came true this year,
from the 13th to the 16th October 2016.
Low Budget, a lot of personal engagement, flexibility and most of all the strong will of

the participants have made this dream come true. Besides the women of the Mine-
Management board Andrea Laux, Ingrid Bregenzer (Germany) and Emese Domösi

(Hungary), Waltraud Erharter and Petra Steinegger from the network of Mother Centers
of South Tyrol were also present, at their own expense, in Buenos Aires. They came to
help Renate Stein, the initiator of the Mother Center Suarez and Manager of Mine with
the organization of the first South American Conference. Besides the women of the first
Argentinian Mother Center in Suarez in the Province of Buenos Aires, Luciana Oliveira
Mendoza, Juliana Mozer and Manuela Stein da Silva Barbosa of the first Mine- Mother
Center initiatives from Goiânia and São Paulo in Brazil also attended the conference.
Although we had to manage ourselves without an interpreter during the first day of the
conference, due to the shortage of budget funds, we quickly noted that our hearts beat
together for these reasons:
‟To create better living conditions for our children and families, to care for the
normalization and peace in our neighborhoods, to assume responsibilities, to contribute
to the development of sensible areas, to impart education, health provisions and
sustainability in the first 1000 days of our children, and to support each other in this
task.“

Read the whole article in .pdf here.

Mother Centers – Creating Caring Communities

The Mother Center movement is an amazing story of how research can spark off a self-help movement.  It all began with a research project commissioned in 1976 by the Department for Family Policies of the German Federal Government, which funds an institute in Munich  to carry out research on youth, children, gender issues and the family.  The research project was to address the issue, why parent education programs were only reaching a small segment of the population: middle class, education oriented families. (more…)

Issues, vision

Some of the major challenges of contemporary societies include an increasingly individualized and aging society as well as increasingly multicultural populations. While family, kin and neighborhood networks are thinning out, the question of social cohesion and social values needs to be re-framed under contemporary conditions. How to live together in social peace and harmony, how to generate social care and responsibility and how to rebuild the social fabric in diverse, conflict-torn and pluralistic societies are issues underlying many of the current concerns around the isolation, alienation and anonymity of communities, the increase of violence, the re-emergence of fundamentalism, the non-engagement of youth and the lack of a pro-active civil society. How to connect with, communicate and understand each other in an increasingly fragmented and polarized society seems to be on everyone’s mind, while nobody seems to know how to really do it.

Mother Centers approach these issues by starting with women and children and by organizing on a community level. The mine network supports the linking of the Mother Center experiences from local to global as well as from global to local in an effort to bridge grassroots and mainstream cultures in the process of creating social peace, bottom up participation and sustainable communities.