Funding an Online Adaptation of the SmartLoving Marriage Seminar
The Marriage Resource Centre is currently considering the development a new marriage enrichment resource that would be the online equivalent of the SmartLoving Marriage Seminar. This resource will be entirely digitally delivered and will help spouses connect with each other and learn practical strategies to build happy and resilient marriages. Like all SmatLoving resources, it will be designed using innovative frameworks and liberating insights from contemporary psychology and Catholic theology. It will utilise video-delivered content removing the need for trained presenters and allow it to be entirely digitally delivered; allowing this program to be rapidly rolled out in a very low cost manner.
There is a significant development cost for this program given both the technology development required, and the amount of filming required to build the video-delivered content. We hope to be able to largely fund this resource through the efforts of the Foundation.
Funding a Newlywed Digital Resource
The newlywed years are well known to be the highest risk years for marriage breakdown. The Marriage Resource Centre is presently in the process of designing a digital resource designed to support couples through these years with a weekly thought piece. Content development is underway, and funds will help complete the process and build the digital platform.
Funding a National Marriage Educators Conference
The Marriage Resource Centre hosts Australia’s largest national conference of Catholic marriage educators, The Renaissance of Marriage (www.rom.org.au). The conference provides input from Australian and international experts in all areas of Catholic marriage formation and is attended by marriage educators (both paid and volunteer), clergy, teachers and those on the coal face of Catholic marriage and relationship education. The PMRC Foundation provided funding to support the costs associated with hosting this event.
In February 2022, the Marriage Resource Centre will host the next Renaissance of Marriage Conference. Registration fees once again will be kept to a minimum, intended to cover the direct and variable costs of the conference only. The Marriage Resource Centre will be seeking funding from the PMRC Foundation to contribute to the fixed costs associated with hosting this event in order to make it accessible to as many attendees as possible.
Supporting organisations working with Youth
The PMRC Foundation actively supports organisations, such as Real Talk International, who provide relationship and proximate marriage education within a Christian ethos to students in high schools.
Good marriage and relationship skills are learnt from an early age, starting in the home, where children learn who they are and how the human person is called to give and receive love. The term proximate marriage education refers to the period in time when young people are dating and starting to make choices about life-long partners.
It is important that students are receiving positive information about healthy relationships and the value of their own self during this formative period in their life, in order to achieve respectful and lasting relationships and marriages in future years. The PMRC seeks to continue to offer funding to broaden the reach of existing programs of Real Talk throughout Australia and to encourage new initiatives in this area.