1. Call 612-925-1203, or email info@earlycatholicfamilylife.org

• We would absolutely love to share more about our program!

• We can tell you about training and give you a sense of what implementation looks like.

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2. Let us send you a Starter Packet and a sample of the curriculum from both the Early Childhood Leader's Guide and the Parent Discussion Leader's Guide.

• The Starter Packet will give a lot of additional information about the program, about the materials that are needed, about training, and lots of other information about what it takes to get ECFL going in a parish.

• The curriculum sample from the Early Childhood Leaders Guide gives weekly themes, the schedule of a session and the activities from Lesson 1 - God Made Everything. The sample of the Parent Discussion Guide gives an outline of all the Parent sessions and includes all of Lesson 1 - Growing in Faith. The materials show that the purpose of the Parent Discussion time is to facilitate faith-based discussion---it's not lecture and it does not take a religious professional to lead the class.

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3. Talk with the staff and with your peers about the ECFL program. Encourage them to visit the ECFL website (earlycatholicfamilylife.org) and watch the video. Help him to discover how beautiful the program is.

• Additionally, here are a few links to great coverage of ECFL:

  • Salt + Light TV interview with Patrick Douglas, Archdiocese of Toronto

  • Starting Small, Starting Strong​ (by CSCOE)

  • ECFL Seeks to Support Parents, Build on Faith (by CSCOE)

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4. ECFL will enable your parishes to reach young families - a key demographic. Remember - ECFL fits in the gap between Baptism and First Communion - and it engages both parents and children.

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5. ECFL will help your parish schools to connect with young parents who are deciding right now which school their children will attend.

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6. In working with Diocese', we have found two successful ways to train for and implement ECFL.

 

a. The "pilot" method. This method was used successfully in the Archdiocese of Toronto.

In the first year of the pilot, a group of parishes (4-5) is selected to introduce the program to your diocese. A training is scheduled for your location at which individuals from the pilot parishes attend. We travel to your location to conduct training. 

In the second year of the pilot, a new group of 4-5 parishes is selected. We travel to your location to conduct the second training, but with an emphasis on passing on the program and its training to the Diocese, so that future trainings can be done by the Diocese itself. We continue to support the Diocese but we do so remotely, with the responsibility for training passed to the Diocese.

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b. The “direct to parishes” method. This is the method used in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and in several other diocese’. The Diocese promotes and highlights the ECFL program through its normal means of communicating with priests, Parish Faith Formation heads, and School Principals. When the Diocese has recruited 10-12 parishes, a training is scheduled and we travel to your Diocese to directly train the parishes that have been recruited. Transition of responsibility for training is then discussed between the Diocese and ECFL.

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For additional promotional and informative materials, go to our Resources page.