Scroll Top

Transformational Change Module 5: Developing/Expanding Services & Supports Based on Systemic and Family-Focus Practices

MODULE 5: DEVELOPING/EXPANDING SERVICES & SUPPORTS BASED ON SYSTEMIC AND FAMILY-FOCUS PRACTICES

Overview:

The public sector has been providing child protective services since the passage of the Child Welfare Act in 1935.  Since 1935 children at risk of abuse and neglect have been removed from their homes and placed in protective services such as foster care and congregate care.  This practice has continued for decades since.

Since the passage of the Families First Prevention Services Act in 2018, a far greater emphasis has been placed on assuring that children will grow up with families by allowing access to prevention services for mental health, substance abuse and in-home parent skill-based programs for youths who are candidates for removal from their homes. Far fewer youths are expected to be removed from their homes in the future.  There is already an array of family services available in most communities, but considerably more family service support will be needed within a community-based approach.

Some community organizations were founded with a mission specifically to serve families in their communities. Some of those organizations have been serving families, often with very little financial support from the public sector, for decades. Now they will have the opportunity to receive some support.  They have been offering a wide array of family support services ranging from hot meal and pantry programs, senior support services, homemaker services, parenting classes, employment and training and job search services, and Head Start and Child Day Care services. 

Some private sector community-based organizations have also been serving families in their communities for decades.  They have been offering out-patient mental health services, in-home family services, and services that wrap around the family. Today human service organizations are serving youth and families from a variety of systems, some of which include child welfare, juvenal justice, education and commercial insurance, office of refugee resettlement, etc.  

No matter what door a youth and their family enter a treatment intervention program through, it is essential family be at the forefront of their work and have a strong voice within the organization. The services that are offered for youths going forward will be expected to be family-focused rather than youth-focused.  There will also be the need for intensive community-based services that offer a more rigorous level of care for youth and families.   This is an area of considerable growth opportunity for those who offer youth services provided they adopt a strong family focus and show they can help to reduce the need for out-of-home care.

Strategies:

BBI’s Family Engagement Toolkit offers a plethora of information on family engagement activities that include the following modules below. Organizations are urged to explore each of these modules for specific and proven strategies for family engagement.

Resources:

  1. Social Determinants of Health – WHO, Health.gov

Introduction – Our Future Lies in our Work with Families:

For almost seventy years organizations believed their most important job was to protect vulnerable children from their families.  During those years, vulnerable children were removed from their homes and many of those children never returned to their families until they were eighteen, if ever.  We have since learned that children need the identity and the sense of belonging that comes from being a member of a family.   Going forward, vulnerable children won’t be removed from their families for long periods of time and the Families First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) ensures that. Organizations who work with youth receiving residential interventions will need to focus on providing family support services.  They will also need to work in partnership with parents, who will help them to set the goals for the work with their youth.  

All families want the best for their children.  All families have strengths, and we want to find those existing strengths in the family and help them develop some new strengths to be successful. Families need to remain actively involved in the daily life of their children throughout any residential intervention.  When a family can’t or won’t be able to reunite with their youth, organizations will need to find alternative families, e.g., kin, or adoptive families, to provide permanent living situations for youth.  Thus, the work we need to do will be to help the youths to successfully reintegrate with their family or to successfully adjust to their life with their new durable networks of natural supports 

Family support will need to be provided through many roles in the organization, not just the traditional social worker role.  Child and youth workers, family facilitators, parent partner and youth partners, family finders, mobile crisis support staff among others will play a vital role in working with families and helping the youth successfully return to community living.  While some of this work will be done in the residential setting, the bulk of the work should be performed in the family’s home and community.  Some of an organization’s community work will also be to help prevent the initial need for out of home care or prevent recidivism for youth who have returned to their families.   

Our work with families must also be about helping them feel safe and secure.  Safety relates to both physical and emotional safety.  Security has two levels; the first relates to a family being able to ensure adequate food, shelter, and clothing for family members.  The second relates to being able to meet basic physical, mental and spiritual health needs.  Few families will be able to address their other needs to help a youth return home until their own safety and security needs are met.

Some believe that a lack of calm is the greatest threat to a family’s safety.  Others believe that security for families often depends upon their ability to access an adequate income.  Many of the families we’ll serve will be locked into patterns of scarce resources and underemployment.  Staff will need to help families to become more stable will have to be able to help them to address any resource or underemployment needs that might exist.  During interviews many families have reported that they need to earn $400 more each month to ensure their family’s security.  Staff can help parents to meet their basic needs by helping them find better paying jobs; find jobs that offer more hours of work; and learning about community resources and then help families to access those resources to meet some of their basic needs.  

Youth and family work is about helping everyone create a hopeful future agenda.  Staff need to become proficient in helping youths and families to develop positive expectations for their future and those expectations can then help families to transform their discouragement into encouragement and their instability into stability.

The following suggestions have come directly from families, and we should consider these in all our work:

  1. Please show us respect.
  2. Let’s develop a plan together.
  3. Appreciate and build upon our strengths.
  4. Bring the service to us whenever possible.
  5. Help us where we hurt the most first.
  6. Build us up and convince us we can succeed.
  7. Let us work primarily with one person.
  8. Organize and prioritize your expectations for us.
  9. Respect our culture and what is important to us.
  10. Acknowledge that we love our children and that they are our children.

The following are some cultural items that we should consider in our work:

  1. Families need to set the agenda for the family work.
  2. Families have values and rules that we need to respect.
  3. Staff need to talk less and listen more in our family work.
  4. Families should be seen as the solution, not the problem.
  5. Staff need to ask many neutral and unbiased questions.
  6. Staff should seek to solve problems and to avoid making judgements.
  7. A partnership with a family means sharing the authority.
  8. Staff should offer suggestions and not make proclamations.
  9. Our organization should never compromise on safety but recognize when we do compromise.
  10. Learn the family history from their own reporting of it.
“We want to practice focusing on what’s going right instead of always focusing on what’s going wrong.”