Collaborative Consultation to Support Family-Centered Services

We have developed a collaborative consultation process that utilizes a three-pronged approach to help agencies:  

*  Identify their core values and principles and utilize appreciative inquiry to elicit the ways in which they are already putting those principles into practice.
*  Adapt an integrated practice framework based on core values and principles to their own particular context.
*  Develop institutional structures and organizational cultures that sustain family centered practice in the face of broader contextual challenges. 

The “product” emerging out of these efforts is a process of reflective practice that helps agencies develop clinical approaches consistent with their values and context.  This process has empowering effects on participants, contributes to enhanced organizational learning and capacity, and is congruent with the values and principles of family-centered services.   

Stories from the Field  

FCSP conducts focus groups with agency participants to identify and elicit stories of existing best practices from workers who are already implementing these ideas in the field. These stories hold the potential to identify:  

*  Particular practices that participants have found most helpful
*  Particular implementation challenges that participants have encountered
*  Concrete implementation recommendations based on existing efforts.  

We have applied this approach with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and with agencies across the country.  This process:  

*  Identifies existing “best practices” with immediate applicability because they grow out of frontline experience and are already happening.
*  Acknowledges and validates existing practice leaders and generates enthusiasm and motivation for new initiatives because they grow from the ground up.
*  Contributes to an organizational culture of reflection, appreciation and shared learning and thus enhances practice depth.   

Developing Family-Driven Outcome Measures  

FCSP has also been involved in helping agencies draw on existing resources to develop family-driven outcome measures that acknowledge the importance of:  

*  Including client voices in outcome measures to ensure partnership with and accountability to the people the helping system serves
*  Developing nuanced measures that recognize the relational context of every clinical practice
*  Developing measures that recognize the uniqueness of human beings and encourage fitting helping efforts to particular clients rather than to specific conditions
*  Honoring our intentions, purposes and values in this work to ensure that we are measuring what is valuable rather than simply valuing what is measurable


For more information about training possibilities, please contact us.