The Now & Next program proactively supports young people with disabilities and their parents and families.
Authors: Peggy Kern and Annick Janson
Professor Peggy Kern is based at the Centre for Wellbeing Science, Faculty of Education at The University of Melbourne and Dr Annick Janson is Director, Now & Next Global.
Now & Next is a peer led group-based program designed to support wellbeing, hope, and empowerment for parents and caregivers of children with disabilities and developmental delays. Beginning in 2015, the program was co-designed with parents/ caregivers of young children and evolved in format and content through rapid prototyping with its first 500 families.
It has since expanded to be offered as both a face-to-face and online format, and versions have been developed for school-aged children, youth, young adults, and their families. Across formats, the program involves 16 hours of evidence-based, experiential learning. Participants learn how to formulate a vision for themselves, their child, and their family; set and achieve goals, and shift their mindset from one relying solely on professional experts for care to being empowered to take the lead in their child’s care.
Over the past 10 years, Now & Next has reached more than 2,180 families across 158 programs in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, Albania, Croatia, Ireland, and Finland. It has been particularly effective in engaging fathers and families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The program continues to innovate with initiatives such as Now & Next School, which supports children’s voice, decision-making, and positive psychology; Youth Quest for teenagers and young adults during school holidays; and Parent Quest for parents of youth. To the best of our knowledge, Now & Next was the first totally ‘by families, for families’ program of its kind, and continues to expand the boundaries of what can be done in proactively supporting young people with disabilities, their parents/ caretakers, and their families.
Conceptually, Now & Next is grounded in Systems Informed Positive Psychology (SIPP; Kern et al., 2020). SIPP integrates principles from both positive psychology and the systems sciences to support both individual and collective thriving, while simultaneously empowering individuals and communities to be agents of positive transformational change (Kern, 2025). As illustrated in our theory of change (see Figure) and aligned with SIPP, Now & Next recognises that families function within interconnected systems—including the family itself, schools, communities, and services. Empowering families necessarily recognizes the complexities that arise as these systems interact with one another, which can be positive, neutral, or negative in nature. By empowering parents through facilitating their approach to core beliefs, the program strengthens alignment across these systems and fosters conditions that enable individual and collective wellbeing. It also requires identifying and shifting the dominant mindsets that drive care. For instance, two dominant mindsets in disability care are that disability is a disadvantage and experts know best (Mahmic, Kern, & Janson, 2021). Now & Next successfully shifts mindsets to the more empowering mindsets of we will start with our strengths and we’ve got this (Mahmic et al., 2021).
Illustration: The Now & Next Theory of Change
Practically, transformational change occurs through both the format and content of the program. The program uses a peer-support model, such that the trainers are parents who have both gone through the program and have lived experience being a parent/ caregiver of children with disability or developmental delays. Passionate parents volunteer to be trained to be facilitators, demonstrating the change they experienced in the program and the desire to give back to other parents. Such parents have a benefit mindset - everyday leaders who learn about their strengths and want to contribute in valuable ways to others (Buchanan & Kern, 2017).
Now & Next Programs for youth and their families are grounded in the Keys to Citizenship framework developed by Simon Duffy (2010). These are played as a team game taking participants through a journey of exploration choosing how and when to develop choice and control over the 7 areas of their best life, thus operationalising their Keys to Citizenship. The content is strengths-based in nature, uses tangible tools such as Pictability, and directly addresses the setting and achieving of goals for the self, the family, and the child. Altogether, Now & Next promotes transformational change through parents partnering with professionals and building a parent peer workforce.
Choice and Control are core values embedded in disability philosophies across countries and governments. These systems are guided by the conviction that every person has the right to lead their own life, direct their supports, and participate fully in their communities with dignity, respect, and autonomy. Choice means recognizing that you have options — being aware that more than one pathway exists and control means believing you can influence what happens next — a sense of agency. However, the question as to how disabled or vulnerable people do develop choice and control is not asked - nor answered in the disability care community anywhere in the world. The early Now & Next and later Quest programs were built from the ground up to develop and measure how people and groups learn to grow and exercise choice and control – i.e. developing both awareness (of options) and agency (of impact).
We have collected data on participants’ experiences with and outcomes associated with the Now & Next program. Our long-term data shows that families continue to apply Now & Next’s strengths-based tools and approaches years after completing the program (Lancaster et al., 2024). Graduates describe not only experiencing personal empowerment but also describe how their learning generates broader community impact. Positive feedback loops demonstrate how when individual flourishing strengthens family dynamics, families engage differently with schools, professionals, and communities, which in turn reinforces broader systemic wellbeing. These feedback loops at the heart of the program are powered by the specific peer-worker training, which builds individual progress into collective momentum. s Positive outcomes occur in communities, parents feel a greater sense of hope and empowerment, creating powerful positive feedback loops.
Many programs show that parents can directly influence their child’s trajectory, their family’s well-being, and their own achievements. However, Now & Next is unique in the documented connection between individual and collective capacity building through a ripple effect. This ripple effect can be traced showing how empowered families, many trained as peer workers, can act as local levers of change. Our data demonstrate that participants use the program’s bespoke strength-based tools to effect impact and reach within their immediate communities. cultivating collective empowerment, hope, and wellbeing outcomes that are sustained over time. Through the program, parents become the drivers of change in both their families and in the disability community, leading to both individual and collective impact.
In 2015, there were few—if any—programs in the disability sector specifically designed to build family leadership and capacity. Both families and professionals overlooked the importance of strengthening family capacity, mistakenly believing that it was primarily the professionals’ expertise that determined a child’s outcomes. Now & Next flipped this model, aiming to empower parents to take the primary action in their child’s care. Emerging leaders learn to take ownership of their own growth and success, which in turn strengthens their ability to empower other families to build greater agency. By harnessing the diverse strengths of its participants, the program cultivates a network of peer leaders who champion and sustain increased family participation within the disability sector. These leaders also model how families can effectively navigate support while avoiding long-term dependence on government systems.
Over the past decade, Now & Next has grown beyond a suite of programs into a growing social movement. Families have created peer networks, founded organisations, run parent-led conferences, and conducted research, multiplying impact through self-sustaining initiatives. Parents move from isolation to finding a village of people, learning to work together, advocate, and share lived experiences. Simon Duffy (2023) The Path to Community reminds us that communities are real things. Now & Next has become a global community, with versions being run both face-to-face and online using video calls, long before such a format became a regular occurrence thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Societal isolation happens both for those who live in rural communities and for families who live in busy metropolitan centres who are not able to just step out of home or get babysitters - in spite of being surrounded by services, they often cannot access them. Now & Next is accessible regardless of location, allowing parents to be connected to the movement even as they care for their child. In the Now & Next social movement, parents move from isolation to community, from advocacy to leadership, reshaping systems in ways that benefit children and families and whose reach and impact can be described and measured.
Lasting change comes through a balance of bottom-up and top-down effects and though the latter is slow to follow, the former most often drives it where human rights are in the balance. Simon Duffy, thank you for reminding us that citizens do not need permission to act and to never underestimate the power of peer support!
Buchanan A & Kern M L (2017) The benefit mindset: The psychology of contribution and everyday leadership. International Journal of Wellbeing, 7, 1-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v7i1.538
Duffy S (2023) The Path to Community. Citizen Network. https://citizen-network.org/library/the-path-to-community.html
Duffy S (2010) The citizenship theory of social justice: Exploring the meaning of personalisation for social workers. Journal of Social Work Practice, 24(3), 253-267.
Kern M L, Williams P, Spong C, Colla R, Sharma K, Downie A, Taylor J A, Sharp S, Siokou C, & Oades L G (2020) Systems informed positive psychology. Journal of Positive Psychology, 15, 705-715. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1639799
Lancaster K, Kern M L, Harding K, Bayasgalan M, Janson A, Mahmic S, & Bhopti A (2024) Exploring long-term outcomes of a peer support programme for parents of children with disability in Australia. Child: Care, Health and Development, 50(2): e13236. https://doi.org/10.1111/cch.13236
Mahmic S, Kern M L, & Janson A (2021) Identifying and shifting disempowering paradigms for families of children with disability through a systems informed positive psychology approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.663640
The publisher is Citizen Network. Empowering Families © Annick Janson and Peggy Kern 2025.
children and families, disability, Family Leadership, Women-Centred, Europe, Global, Article
