Pastoral Planning Initiatives

There are twenty parishes in our Diocese of San Jose participating in this project, where they have been exploring and creating plans to intentionally accompany and support parents in transmitting their faith to their children in the first two decades of life.

1. Parish coordinators were appointed by the parishes and were asked to create a team of 6 to 12 members to create a parish plan that would consider the supports already in place for parents and identify new approaches and strategies needed to support parents to effectively catechize their children, ages 0 to 19 years old. 
   • • Parish Coordinator Guidelines and Parish Team Guidelines were provided to outline the activity of the parish coordinator and the parish team (project goals, vision, and sourced family research) during the monthly Zooms in the fall of 2024. 
     • Parent Café Listening Sessions were used by the parish teams to gain valuable insights into the values and practices of the parents in their parish communities asking these Parent Café Questions
2. In the 1st Workshop of January 19, 2025, the parish coordinators and their teams reflected on leadership as listening to prepare them to listen to families and to gain insights from their listening.  They also analyzed the priority areas for development in family and parent faith formation and began to create a vision and design for family and parent faith formation in the first two decades.  To assist parish teams on beginning to create their parish plans, they were given the tool Creating a Family Faith Formation Plan which included some sample plans.
3. The 2nd Workshop of June 14, 2025 offered parish coordinators and their teams a process to design parent and family programming for Year 1 with a vision of addressing six elements of parent and family faith formation: 
   • • Forming the faith of the family at home
     • Forming the faith of the family in the parish
     • Equipping parents with practices and skills for parenting
     • Equipping parents to be faith formers
     • Providing family catechesis for the entire family
     • Fostering intergenerational relationships.

Four different approaches were offered which can be used alone or in combination with each other to form a faith formation plan for a parish.

4. On September 27, 2025 the 3rd Workshop was offered to our parish coordinators and their teams. The focus was on Designing & Implementing Parent & Family Faith Formation Programming and the following processes and tools were provided:

• • Designing Programs and Activities & Piloting Programming
  • Faith Formation Formats for Programming
  • Digital Tools for Family Faith Formation
  • Curating Faith Formation Resources
  • Designing Family Activities
  • Designing Parent Programming
  • Designing a Family Catechesis Learning Program
  • Leader Development Process and Tools
  • Evaluation: Program Evaluation & Participant Evaluation Tools

There are several websites that curate Catholic content for parent and family faith formation that can assist parishes in finding and selecting Catholic resources for programming. The following two websites were offered to be explored by the participants for the first-year implementation of their parish plans:

• NCCL Catholic Families Project: https://www.ncclcatholicfamilies.org/curated-resources
• Strong Catholic Family Website: https://www.catholicfamilyfaith.org