Across the country, community and state organizations in
mental health, social services, health care, and education are developing new
frameworks to put families at the center of collaborative, strength-based,
culturally responsive services. Founded in 2000, The Family Centered
Services Project (FCSP) is dedicated to inspiring, supporting and enhancing
agencies’ ability to develop family-centered philosophy and practice through
training, organizational consultation, and ongoing coaching and technical
assistance.
Our Approach FCSP recognizes that the challenge to develop program structures and
organizational cultures that support more respectful and responsive
interactions with families can be a great one. We offer training and
organizational consultation to help mental health, social services, health care
and educational agencies embrace and sustain family centered philosophy and
practice. Our approach is
collaborative—designed to help your staff and administrators feel empowered,
engaged and energized about new learning and new approaches, and to create a
high-level of buy-in across all levels of your organization. The framework that
guides our work draws from a variety of field-tested, cutting-edge theoretical
models and is guided by the following principles:
* Striving for cultural responsiveness and honoring family and
community wisdom
* Believing in the possibility of change and building on family and
community resourcefulness
* Working in partnership with families and fitting services to clients
rather than clients to services
* Engaging in empowering processes and actively eliciting client feedback
Outcomes and Benefits
Family centered services are clinically effective, fiscally efficient, and in
high demand. Family advocacy groups have called for just such an
approach. Empirical research has documented the centrality of constructive
helping relationships for good outcomes for families. And, professionals
report that this approach not only makes their work with families more
effective but also contributes to their feeling energized and hopeful in the
workplace. In our experience, organizations that imbue their processes and
structures with a commitment to family centered practice experience a
high-level of staff empowerment, buy-in, and productivity.
Our Staff William Madsen, Ph.D. is the Founder and
Director of the Family Centered Services Project. He provides international training and
consultation regarding collaborative approaches to therapy and the development
of institutional cultures that support family-centered work. Prior to his
current efforts, Bill was the Director of the Program in Narrative Therapies at
the Family Institute of Cambridge and a Senior Associate at the Public
Conversations Project. He has spent most
of the last 30 years working with multi-stressed families in public sector
mental health, social service and health care settings. He has developed and administered innovative
programs that combine outpatient and home-based services and has written and
presented extensively about the development of strengths-based, collaborative
partnerships between families and helpers.
He is the author of Collaborative
Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families (2nd Edition) and is currently
working on another book tentatively entitled, Helping: Towards More Supportive Services, which is an effort to
highlight a practice framework of "collaborative helping" for family support workers, case managers, and
milieu workers.
Philip Decter, MA, MSW is the Associate Director of the the Family
Centered Services Project. He has developed and administered numerous in-home family therapy programs and for the past six years has provided training and consultation to child welfare departments around the country about the "Signs of Safety" approach to child protective services and institutional ways of developing supervisory and management structures that support more respectful and responsive ways of interacting with families.
Elizabeth (Betsy) Buckley, LICSW is an associate at the Family Centered Services Project. She is a social worker and family therapist who has been working and living with the ideas and practices of narrative therapy since 1994. She has spent the last eleven years working with families who struggle with multiple systemic stresses and injustices in their homes. She is privileged to be a witness to these families' lives, and brings the wisdom that she has learned from them to her teaching in multiple contexts, including her work with FCSP. She has taught previously at the Simmons School of Social Work, Cambridge College School of Education, the Family Institute of Cambridge, and at agency settings throughout New England.
Silvana Castaneda, MSW, LICSW is an associate at the Family
Centered Services Project and field faculty at Simmons School of Social
Work. She was the Clinical Director at The Family Center Inc. for six years
where she administered outpatient and home-based teams. As a family and couples
therapist of 20 years she has worked in community based settings with a
particular interest in immigrant families impacted by separation and
reunification.
Yolanda Coentro, LICSW is an associate with the Family Centered Services
Project. She is a clinical social worker who currently is the Director of
an in home therapy program as well as a therapeutic mentoring program. She has worked as a community organizer and
has experiences in both congregate care and community based settings. She
trains and consults in the areas of diversity, program management and community
based mental health. Yolanda is the
Chair of the CBHI Workforce Development Pipelines Committee and is a member of
the CBHI Health Disparities Committee.
