Family Interaction

When you perform work under a contract, your client tells you what you need to do and, often, how to do it. When DHS decided Family Interaction was important to keep Iowa’s kids safe, it became something that agencies needed to do. But they asked the private side to help figure out how to do it. Not literally – not how you write a family interaction plan - but how we all implement a new practice as a standard.

This was one of our first projects to test the collaborative process. We assembled our best champions of the practice – from public and private agencies, from our families, and other advocates. We used phone calls, meetings, trial trainings and geographical considerations to adjust the curriculum to fit Iowa’s needs and customized the training to fit the needs of different service areas.

What we did was involve several stakeholders in the process. What we saw was the voices of many gives us a bigger picture and a better solution.

When we held regional trainings, you should have seen the trainers – they were excited to teach, and the attendees could feel it. Sometimes training can be a bit tiring, but you could feel the energy at these trainings. (Chris)

For example...

There is a practice called Family Interaction that helps parents whose children are in foster care learn from foster families. It’s proven effective and nationally recognized as something that helps birth parents create a safe home for the child(ren) to return to.

We knew it was something great, but we needed to figure out how to communicate how it works and why we believe in it. We needed to explain it to birth families, to foster families, to agency employees and to court officials. So in this new partnership approach, guess what we did?

We asked people that already recognized the value to help us spread the word to their peers. No preset ideas. No training as usual. We wanted out of the box. And guess what? When we asked, we got it!

Chris and I took on Family Interaction together, and we started with our agencies. What did our staff know? Who did our staff know that already practiced Family Interaction? What did families think of it? What was practical and what was not?

Wendy