The Family Resiliency Program was established in 2000 in partnership with The Pampered Chef, a company that provides cooking tools and recipes to assist people in the kitchen and enhance family mealtimes. The company’s founder, Doris Kelley Christopher, is a University of Illinois Urbana Champaign graduate who recognized the common goals shared by the Family Resiliency Program and The Pampered Chef, aspirations that included advocating for families, fostering resiliency in families, and finding solutions to family problems.

In 2003, The Pampered Chef Endowed Chair in Family Resiliency was established in the Department of Human Development and Family Services in the College of ACES at Illinois. That same year, the College of ACES and the Christopher Family Foundation announced their support for the creation on campus of Doris Kelley Christopher Hall, where the Family Resiliency Center would be housed.

With support from The Pampered Chef in 2005, the Family Resiliency Program was able to offer funding for dissertation research awards, additional faculty research grants, and public-engagement activities.

Doris Kelley Christopher Hall and the Family Resiliency Center (FRC) came to fruition in 2006. The Illinois campus now had a world-class facility where innovative research, education, and outreach on family resiliency was taking place. Efforts immediately began to systematically connect research, application, and policy to help strengthen families’ abilities to meet life’s challenges and thrive.