Learning by Watching: The Generational Impact of Parent Cafés
“The Café starts on the bus!”
Growing Up with Cafés
Abraham Blue doesn't remember much from those early Parent Cafés at Vision for Children at Risk (VCR) in St. Louis. He was just a kid, full of energy, running around the building while adults gathered in circles to talk about parenting, connection, and community.
"I was a child that had a lot of energy," Abraham recalls with a laugh. "Getting snacks and running around. And I remember the bus for sure."
The bus! The Café pick-up bus is where it all began for so many families at VCR. As Sam Blue, Abraham's father and one of VCR's first Parent Café hosts, puts it: "The Café starts on the bus!"
Twelve years later, Abraham isn't running around the edges anymore; he's standing at the center. He is a leader on VCR’s Youth Advisory Council (YAC) and a trained host for #WoWTalk Cafés, the youth-adapted version of Parent Cafés. He is continuing the model of peer connection and shared strength that his parents helped establish over a decade ago.
Building Relationships from Day One
Sam Blue was Sanaria Sulaiman’s first hire when she began as the Director of Project LAUNCH at VCR in 2013. She knew from the moment they met that he, too, believed that real change in families and communities doesn't happen through programs delivered to people. It happens through relationships built with them.
Together with Sam and a team at VCR, Sanaria completed the Be Strong Families training and offered Parent Cafés as a way to build trust with families throughout St. Louis. And it worked. Their office could comfortably accommodate 50 people, but they regularly had 70 to 80 attendees at Parent Cafés.
"They would come and sit on the floor because they felt like they belonged," Sanaria remembers.
Sam connected with families through his own lived experience. As a father of nine children and former president of Clinton-Peabody, the largest public housing development in St. Louis, he understood what families were navigating. He knew about managing pressure, making things work, learning alongside neighbors, and wanting the best for your children regardless of zip code or circumstance.
All the while, Abraham was watching, even when he was just a kid running around getting snacks.
Children Absorb the Café Experience, too
It’s easy to focus on the immediate benefits of Parent Cafés – the peer support, practical strategies, and just having a moment to breathe and connect with others who understand how hard it is to be a parent. However, what is always occurring but not always evident is what children are absorbing simply by coming along, by being present in the Parent Café environment.
Abraham grew up "in front of our eyes," as Sanaria puts it. He came to the building when his mother attended Cafés. He saw adults creating space for honest conversation. He witnessed his father facilitating, listening, and holding space for others. He experienced belonging in community before he had language for it.
Years later, in 2022, when VCR launched the Youth Advisory Council, Abraham was a natural fit. He had been learning about peer leadership and support his whole life. By his senior year of high school, he had become one of five youth leaders helping to shape the YAC’s direction.
VCR Expands to Youth Leadership
After eight years of successfully offering Parent Cafés, VCR began offering Vitality Cafés, which use the same structured Café approach but are grounded in the Six Domains of Vitality. Sanaria reports that “the adults love it.”
To expand their system of care and wrap around the whole family, they moved beyond Cafés and the Parent Advisory Council toward youth leadership and peer support. As the COVID pandemic closures were nearing the end, VCR started a safe space for youth through YAC. Coming back together in person is what the young people needed most.
The YAC started as a small group but now includes 22 active youth members who meet monthly with staff. Sanaria was thrilled when Abraham joined the group.
YAC in Action
This year during the annual Children’s Mental Health Week at VCR, Abraham was one of the keynote speakers; he spoke publicly about the importance of youth mental health, and reducing stigma.
Further, VCR and the Deaconess Foundation have partnered to launch the NextGen Grantmaking Initiative aimed at placing funding decisions directly in the hands of young changemakers. This shifts traditional grantmaking power structures by empowering youth as decision-makers, not just beneficiaries. In this process youth will design, lead, and allocate grant funds to projects that matter most to them and their communities.
Most recently, the YAC launched #WoWTalk Cafés.
Youth Cafés
The YAC's latest initiative brings peer support full circle. To launch #WoWTalk Cafés (short for “Words of Wisdom”), Be Strong Families trained the YAC youth in March 2025. Unlike some youth trainings that are mostly adults, this one included 5 YAC youth members alongside 6 of their trusted adults and supporters. This was an intentional choice by VCR to build skills while maintaining peer support. The youth were excited, engaged, and practiced their facilitation parts thoroughly. The Be Strong Families trainers were so impressed. One shared fondly afterward, “They have such good ideas! They think they can save the world…and they probably can.”
A #WoWTalk Café still focuses on peer-to-peer connection, shared hosting, agreements about respect and confidentiality, and conversation prompts that invite authentic reflection. But since it’s a version created by youth, for youth, and hosted by youth, the content, the music, and the vibe is all theirs.
"What’s Your Frame?" was their first Café theme. In one activity, youth were asked to choose a section of the room representing thorns, roses, or blossoms, depending on what they felt most connected to or were focusing on this year – challenges, highlights, or new ideas. It was Abraham's idea for an icebreaker, designed to help participants open up before deeper one-on-one conversations.
The first #WoWTalk Café was “rough around the edges," Abraham admits, but nobody cared that it wasn’t perfect, because that’s not what mattered. What mattered was that young people created space for themselves for self-reflection, sharing, and connection.
What Keeps Youth Coming Back
“The responsibility for the next generation” is what keeps Sam Blue in the work and what shaped Abraham’s idea of leadership.
Abraham is clear that this is why the youth keep coming back to YAC and the #WoWTalk Cafés, too: “They want the community, and to feel like they have some responsibility.”
It's not about being lectured to or managed. It's about being trusted with something real. It's about critical thinking, about bringing friends, about hearing guest speakers, about responsibility and having a voice in decisions that affect their schools and communities.
Involving emerging and young adults is about shaping the next generation, but it’s also about making meaningful change now. As Sanaria put it, “Youth are not just the future – they are the present, and their voices are essential in shaping the change they want to see.”
How have Parent Cafés changed over the years? They haven’t, according to Sam. Sure, he says, each time it’s a little different, but it never gets old. “Especially when you grow older, you share wisdom and help the next generation. That never changes.”
Sanaria, Sam, and Abraham emphasize that the work is relationship-based, always. Building trust with families has stayed the same from the very beginning and now extends to working with youth who grew up watching their parents participate.
The Ripple Effect
Abraham is now in college, continuing his leadership work with VCR while building his own path. The child who ran around grabbing snacks is now the young man facilitating peer conversations, mentoring youth, and being interviewed on St. Louis Public Radio.
His father is still at VCR too, now serving as a Family Support Partner, getting deeper into families' lives and supporting parents as they navigate systems and challenges. "It takes a village," Sam says. "It takes a family – every moving part, every skillset. We need each other – the old need the young and the young need the old. We all have to move together."
And somewhere, other children like the ones at VCR are running around the building right now while their parents sit in circles, talking, listening, and connecting. They're also absorbing something they won't have words for until much later.
They're learning that connection matters, that leadership is powerful, that community is where you find strength and meaning. They're learning by watching, just like Abraham did.
The Café starts on the bus, but who knows where it stops? The foundation of respect, kindness, and the belief that people access the wisdom and strength they need in community reaches generations.
Be Strong Families would like to extend deep gratitude to VCR for their long-term partnership and commitment to empowering parents, youth, and families. To learn more about bringing these peer-to-peer connection models to your community, visit bestrongfamilies.org.