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Abstract

A workshop entitled “Marketing Your RAPP to Effectively Reach Relative Caregivers” was developed and offered at the 2019 Brookdale Foundation Training Conference for professionals who work with kinship caregivers, or “Relatives as Parents Programs” (RAPP). The intention of this interactive brainstorming session was to give individual RAPP programs the opportunity to share and adopt proven effective methods to reach, attract, and enhance their own local or statewide caregiver programs. The attending group was comprised of over 50 individuals who operated RAPP programs that spanned the US. The three workshop facilitators (authors of this brief with 70 collective years of experience) were chosen because their programs represented kinship professionals and caregivers from differing localities (urban, suburban, and rural), races, ethnicities, and financial demographics. Since the inception of these programs in the 1990s, and despite their demographic differences, the Grandparent Resource Center (GRC) of the New York City Department for the Aging, the Grandparent Connection of the Jewish Association Serving the Aged (JASA), and the Relatives as Parents Program (RAPP) of Cornell Cooperative Extension—Orange County (CCE-OC), utilized similar strategies that helped grow their programs from serving single digits to hundreds of families per year. The consensus of the authors, supported and added to by workshop participants, is that the shared strategies and methods proposed in this brief could be considered “best practices” and useful for any intergenerational program in the United States with a similarly defined audience.

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