Significant research suggests that the best support for family centered practice among frontline workers comes from agency organizational cultures that are grounded in the same values and principles.  To help community agencies and state organizations develop family centered philosophy and practice, we offer training, consultation and ongoing supervision and coaching.

Training in Mental Health, Child Welfare, Health Care and Educational Settings

FCSP provides a wide range of training for agencies interested in enhancing their ability to engage and collaboratively work with families in challenging situations.  We offer trainings for frontline workers, supervisors and administrators in social service, mental health, health care and educational settings.  We can customize workshops to fit the needs of your particular agency or program.  

Organizational Consultation to Support Family Centered Practice

Many organizations that embrace a family centered philosophy regularly struggle to maintain family centered practices, especially when faced with high workloads and bureaucratic mandates.  FCSP stands in this gap by helping you develop sustainable organizational practices that support and honor your commitment to family centered practice. FCSP can work with your team, agency or organization using a collaborative consultation process.

We will work with your staff and administration to help them:

*  Appreciate their existing clinical knowledge and best individual practices
*  Build on this foundation to develop a collective vision of best organizational practices 
*  Identify core commitments in this vision that can inspire and re-energize participants
*  Develop concrete practices to bring these commitments into daily work experiences

We believe this to be a very effective process for organizational change. It applies the values and principles of family centered services in the context of organizational change in order to enhance learning and capacity. Because the new organizational structures and supports are built on existing staff successes and values, staff empowerment and buy-in are inherent outcomes of the process. Our experience has demonstrated that this process can be effectively adapted to meet the needs of a wide range of agencies.  

Supervision Groups

FCSP offers on-going supervision and consultation groups for supervisors and administrators in home-based, residential, and outpatient settings who are seeking on-going support to sustain family-centered philosophy and practice in their agencies and organizations.

At its core, family-centered services represents a spirit, attitude or relational stance from which workers approach their work.  We seek to foster that spirit in our training and consultation activities by applying the same values and commitments that guide our work with families to our work with programs and agencies.

Uncovering Participants’ Best Work  

Our training and consultation is strongly influenced by a process called “appreciative inquiry.”  We connect with participants to discover their best moments in challenging situations and use those moments as a foundation to develop an inspiring vision of the possibilities in their work.  We examine with participants the values and hopes that make this vision personally relevant and help them distill that vision into concrete organizing principles that can flexibly guide their work.   This process allows us to help participants integrate their own “best practices” with “state of the art” theories and practices and demonstrate how this learning process can be integrated into their daily work.   

Learning Conversations  

In our training and consultation, we seek a collaborative environment where we develop shared knowledge through learning conversations.  We view participants as active members who already hold a great deal of knowledge, skill and experience and consultants as facilitators with both practical content knowledge and particular expertise in helping learners explore their own best practices and articulate their underlying organizing principles.  Throughout, we balance organized structure with the flexibility and responsiveness of emergent design.   

Active, Experiential Training and Consultation  

Our approach to training and consultation is to “work from the inside out.”  We take participants through a three-part process designed to engage them as active participants in their own learning. We begin by eliciting participants’ hopes and purposes in order to craft the agreed upon focus which we believe can and should originate with participants.  Then we engage participants in experiential exercises that create opportunities for them to develop an intimate feel for new ideas and practices. These exercises are followed by group reflection and discussion on what has been learned from the exercises and how that learning can be concretely applied to participants’ own work settings.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” - W.B. Yeats