Supporting Healthy Relationships, Montefiore Medical Center

Montefiore's Supporting Healthy Relationships (SHR) program is designed to empower low-income couples in the Bronx to achieve family and financial stability and success. Our mission is to help couples understand how to form and maintain better relationships, to become better parents for their children, and to maintain more stable homes.

Low-income couples experience numerous stressors such as substance abuse, chronic medical disorders, unstable housing, multiple partner fertility leading to step-children in the home, and significant economic stress due to unemployment or underemployment. The fragility and instability of relationships among low-income couples may be due to the amount of stress they face and the lack of resources or external support for dealing with it. Under stress and lacking relationship knowledge and skills, many couples living in low-income communities are vulnerable. We believe that relationship and marriage education, coupled with family stabilizing activities, and access to services that address couples’ stressors, will support and strengthen fragile relationships and families.

We view employment as a “family stability” issue rather than individual issue, and the support of the family is critical to employment success. We believe that mothers and fathers are invested in enhancing their financial contributions to family living whenever possible. We take a comprehensive approach to service delivery because we believe that relationship education alone is not enough to combat many of the destabilizing stressors that low-income couples face. Relationship education, couples employment services, and case management are the three pillars of our program.

We believe that work and parenting are crucial to relationship stability since these core roles build self-esteem and establish a sense of responsibility and teamwork. Integrating relationship and parenting education with employment services, case management, and supportive service referrals will help couples cope with myriad stressors and become more stable and self-sufficient Offering employment assistance to couples alongside relationship education is a novel and possibly better way of delivering this social service, since employment services are typically provided to individuals. By working with couples to address employment goals, we increase their motivation by making clear connections between employment and benefits to the couple’s children.