By Max Broennle | FāVS News Reporter
Ron Hauenstein was tabling for the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative (SpoFI) when a teenage girl, alongside two other young teens, approached his booth. She promptly asked Hauenstein a question.
“Is this where I come to get a father?” she said to him, explaining that her father was an addict who wasn’t around.
That moment, years ago, reinforced what Hauenstein and his fellow board members had set out to do when they established SpoFI on Jan. 20, 2016. The Christian organization, which became a nonprofit in 2017, operates on a traditional view of family structure: that children thrive best with both a mother and a father in the home, and that fathers play an irreplaceable role in their children’s lives.
“The vision and mission of the Spokane Fatherhood Initiative is to restore the value of fatherhood so that every child has a present, loving and nurturing father,” according to SpoFI’s website.
From support groups to foster care advocacy
The organization provides support to struggling fathers and their families around Spokane, including fatherhood training classes, helping formerly incarcerated fathers return to society and offering resources through Spokane Family Law and Self Help Center.
SpoFI’s programs have lasting impacts on the clients they work alongside. They work primarily with men who feel isolated or are recovering from addiction, according to Hauenstein.
For many of these men, the connections they build become lifelong.
Hauenstein wants to believe his dad jokes are why men keep coming to the SpoFI fraternity, but it’s more than that.
“We are told repeatedly by our dads that this sense of community that they feel here is the primary reason they keep coming back,” Hauenstein said.
Providing a space for dads to have support and prioritizing child safety has been on the forefront of SpoFI’s initiative.
That mission extends beyond building community. SpoFI has also worked to address the broader crisis of fatherlessness in Spokane.
In the summer of 2018, SpoFI attended the ‘Wait No More’ conference to promote foster care and adoption for children in need.
When asked if fatherlessness remains a root problem in Spokane, Hauenstein replied “more so than ever.”
About 100 Christians from the Spokane region agreed with that sentiment back in 2016, at the public forum that prompted the creation of SpoFI, according to their history page.
After hitting their 10-year anniversary in January, SpoFI leadership reflects on how, despite societal and cultural shifts, their goal remains the same.
“I don’t think what a father’s role in the family has ever changed. I think it’s been constant through the generations and almost all societies and all cultures,” Fred Dent, vice president and founding board member of SpoFI, said.
SpoFI leadership believes in the importance of a two parent household of a mother and a father and the impact it can have within a young person’s life.
“Something happens when fathers are present and involved in their children. We don’t diminish the role of mothers. We’re not trying to say that fathers are better; kids do best with both parents. But the fathers bring authority and respect and mothers are about love and nurturing. Every kid knows you can manipulate mom — far more challenging to deal with dad,” Hauenstein said.
Dent went on to say how culture shifts have led to a new perception of fathers and their role within the family unit.
“The change has been our cultural attitudes, our secular attitudes, if you will, toward the importance of a dad and the family,” Dent said.
Both Hauenstein and Dent mentioned the Woman’s Suffrage movement as a driving factor for society invalidating the role fathers play within the nuclear family.
“The women’s movement, I think, started for very noble and laudable purposes. And that was that every person, every human being should be encouraged to pursue their dreams and to find out what they’re good at and go for it. But it eventually became a much more radical view,” Hauenstein said. “It became a cultural phenomenon that women were encouraged to become like men.”
This shift, according to Hauenstein and Dent, decreased an emphasis on how important fathers are to a familial unit.
“The rise of the independent women movement, the sexual revolution, the introduction of drugs and contraceptives to make it easier to not be responsible to produce children … contributed to lessening the importance of dads in the family role,” Dent said.
800 graduates and counting
Since their establishment in 2016, more than 800 fathers have graduated from their programs. They now have a 93% graduation rate for their courses.
Hauenstein said how he views SpoFI’s role in the community as “proactive work, not reactive work” and continues to think about the teen who approached him years ago.
“I pray for her every day,” Hauenstein said, and how it was a “reinforcement of what we were doing and the need to keep doing it.”
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