Laure Clemons, Founder and Director of Extended Family, a community-based non-profit
organization located in Cherokee County, Alabama, was recently interviewed by Ana Gascon
Ivey of the website GoodRx.com for a series of articles titled “10 ways to Help Children Who
Have Incarcerated Parents,” published on April 4, 2023, and “15 Coping Tips for Families
Dealing with Incarceration,” published on April 5, 2023. Mrs. Clemons is cited regularly
throughout the articles, particularly in the section on “Coping strategies for children dealing
with incarceration,” based on material she has developed into a nine-week curriculum for
children ages 5 to 18 for a program called Extended Family for Kids (EFK). EFK is taught to
children in Cherokee County, as well as in DeKalb, Etowah, and Calhoun Counties. Mrs.
Clemons also conducts trainings for Program Leaders for EFK across Alabama and the US.
The first GoodRx article also quotes Mrs. Clemons in the section “How to talk to a child about
their parent’s imprisonment,” and uses some of the strategies she has developed for her EFK
programs, including the most important message to children with an incarcerated family
member – “It’s not your fault!” Clemons states, “Words are powerful, and our kids need to
hear the words over and over, ‘It’s not your fault!’” Mrs. Clemons is intimately familiar with the
subject of how to support a family through having a loved one incarcerated because her
daughters were 12 and 16 years old when her husband was incarcerated. She looked around
for support for herself and her children, and upon realizing how little was available, created the
curriculum that has helped thousands of children today!
