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Frequently Asked Questions: Family-Centered Practice

• Questions and answers
• General resources
• Frequently requested information

Questions and answers

• What is family-centered practice?
  Family-centered practice is a way of working with families, both formally and informally, across service systems to enhance their capacity to care for and protect their children. Family-centered practice includes a range of strategies, including advocating for improved conditions for families, supporting them, stabilizing those in crisis, reunifying those who are separated, building new families, and connecting families to resources that will sustain them in the future.
  
  

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General resources

• Can We Put Clothes on This Emperor? (PDF - 528 KB)
• Family-Centered Practice
• Philosophy and Goals of Family-Centered Practice

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Frequently requested information

• Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare
  Information on partnership initiatives in multiple sites, including descriptions, key strategies, and evaluations.
  
  
• Changing the Culture of the Workplace
  Describes the Children's Bureau vision for how States can change workplace culture to create family-centered, community-based systems that provide individualized services and strengthen parents' capacity to provide for their children's needs.
  
  
• Best Practice/Next Practice: Family-Centered Child Welfare (PDF - 366 KB)
  This issue examines differential response systems that customize services to address each family's specific situation.
  
  
• Permanency Planning Today (PDF - 4870 KB)
  This issue highlights how family-centered practice has been incorporated into training and technical assistance provided to States by the National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning.
  
  
• Family to Family: Tools for Rebuilding Foster Care
  Overview, tools, and resources from a neighborhood-based, family-centered foster care reform initiative.
  
  
• Information Packet: Child Welfare Mediation (PDF - 118 KB)
  Overview, facts, legislative review, best practice tips, model programs, and bibliography.
  
  
• National Center on Family Group Decision Making
  Resources on family group decision-making.
  
  

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Updated on October 29, 2009