Marriage Matters History

The Weatherwax Foundation, a small private foundation in Jackson, MI, developed a community-wide healthy marriage initiative in response to a pattern they discovered in its grant making. Executive Director Maria Miceli Dotterweich explains, “ So many of the problems we saw crossing our desks were related to family breakdown. We felt that if we could address that issue, then we could forestall other problems down the road.”

After a visit to First Things First in Chattanooga during a conference sponsored by the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Foundation approached the United Way with a request to convene a community planning team to explore the possibility of a healthy marriage initiative in Jackson County, which has a higher divorce rate than the state average.

The Foundation provided funding for a nine-month planning process, during which the team explored opportunities to strengthen marriages in Jackson County, while providing education, preparation and enrichment activities in support of marriage. For example, the community collaborative sponsors a monthly Brown Bag Lunch Series to highlight healthy marriages and families through continued education and discussion, and hosted a successful “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage” workshop weekend for 500 people in September of 2006. The event will be hosted once again February 8 and 9, 2008.

Another key part of the planning process was determining attitudes of local residents toward marriage-related issues. One survey question asked, “Do you think cohabitation helps prepare you for marriage?” According to Dotterweich, initial survey responses will later serve to measure the success of the initiative: “After we see what those attitudes are, then we will begin a campaign to move them in healthier directions supported by data. Later, we will go back to see if we were able to encourage a community-wide change in those attitudes.”

The Weatherwax Foundation’s involvement in marriage is guided by three principles. First, the Foundation worked with the Jackson community to develop a two-line definition to shape the scope of its work.” “The healthy marriage initiative provides education, preparation and enrichment activities in support of marriage. In addition, this initiative promotes the empirical value of the personal and societal merits of marriage for wives, husbands and children.”

Second, the Weatherwax Foundation is committed to a positive approach, particularly in its language, an approach which Dotterweich describes as “uniquely American.”  She explains, “We do not go out and say, ‘If you divorce, bad, bad things will happen.’ We say, ‘A healthy marriage means these good things; two parents in the home means these benefits for your children.’ Americans, with their natural bent for self-improvement, are interested in learning about the best way to buy a house. Why not the best way to be married and raise children?”

Third, Weatherwax has leveraged its resources by engaging a wide range of constituencies. The planning process involves partners such as human service providers, clergy, attorneys and parents who deal with the effects of broken families, thus building a solid foundation of support for a strong community healthy marriage initiative.

As the nine-month planning process concluded, Weatherwax entered the next phase of its healthy marriage initiative with valuable knowledge of its community’s needs. The initiative is now known as Marriage Matters Jackson. A surprising thing the foundation learned is that “people are looking for very basic life-skills, which are necessary to be successful in marriage or anything else,” says Dotterweich. “People are entering marriage without the skills of home management, or how to put a meal on the table, or communication, some real nuts-and-bolts kids of things that cut across every spectrum.”