Monday, December 20, 2010

Addressing Barriers Quicker

We’ve seen a significant benefit in the increased family team meetings and the addition of “nontraditional” participants. In fact, we’ve seen that these additional people feel empowered when they find out that their participation can positively impact the children’s future and the parents’ success.

It’s exciting for all of us, though, to see each other discarding the silos of roles and getting back to the basics of focusing on results. When we partner together, we push up our sleeves, jump in and rely on each other to focus on solutions and not roles. Even better, we’ve gone even further and explored the potential of new roles for families’ personal network.

We’ve been able to address barriers more quickly, so it provides results more quickly. And who can’t appreciate that?

The natural advantage to bringing in more people is that we’re also building an informal support system for the family. Our work is intensive while the case is open, so you can imagine what an adjustment it can be when suddenly we’re out of the picture. Those additional people and the informal supports they create are key, because they will be involved with the family long after we are gone. We have to identify people in the families’ lives that can take the ball when we step aside.

Heidi

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Family Team Meetings

Utilizing family team meetings has been a great way to come together to support a family. Uniting everyone is so beneficial, especially on a complicated case.

Family team meetings are a critical way to engage parents, attorneys and other stakeholders. However, through collaboration, we began holding them more often, evolving past the one-time-only engagement. When we held additional family meetings, we were able to engage “nontraditional” members in the meetings like people from the family’s church, school staff, friends and relatives.

Traditionally, cases started with a family team meeting, the assessment and case plan was written, and that was it for family meetings. As we get to know the families after the team meeting, we learn about more people who are influential in the lives of the families - people who can potentially make a significant impact in the success of the family. But we only find out about those individuals by blending the work and knowledge of everyone on the team.

We’ve also recognized that to reach our mutual goals, we have to step out of our comfort zone and break free of traditional roles. A common barrier has traditionally been client transportation, especially when it comes to resources. In the past we may have walked away from the issue because it was someone else’s responsibility. Now we look at these other people in the families’ personal network and seek out those individuals and identify how they can fill in that gap – a gap that can be so detrimental to the families’ success.


Jody