Family Matters Group - Child Rights Advocate"

THE CONCEPT
VARIOUS APPLICATIONS
STRATEGIC PLANNING: BEFORE THE CRISIS
THE REFERRAL PROCESS
MEASURING SUCCESS

THE CONCEPT

“Wraparound is a planning process that follows a series of steps to help children and their families realize their hopes and dreams. The wraparound process also helps make sure children and youth grow up in their homes and communities. It is a planning process that brings people together from different parts of the whole family’s life. With help from one or more facilitators, people from the family’s life work together, coordinate their activities, and blend their perspectives of the family’s situation.” - The National Wraparound Initiative

After decades of implementation in the United States and abroad, this highly successful, evidence-based practice continues to grow as a social service model, gaining acceptance and recognition as the strategy that will most likely accomplish it’s fundamental commitments: to keep children in school, at home and out of trouble.

A strength-based, or “positive” point of view, is certainly not a new approach to successful interpersonal challenges, whether in the workplace, schools, or in therapeutic environments, just to name a few. After a problem has been defined and options proposed, truly progressive “think tanks” often arrive upon a strength-based framework to which a solution can be attached.

APPLICATIONS: Family, Military or Corporate

Where FAMILY MATTERS GROUP experts agree; having extensive experience with the social service version of the Wraparound process (as well as experience providing trainings to county professionals as well as families), FAMILY MATTERS GROUP believes that this model need not be limited to this one version, but can be molded and modified to meet the needs of an almost endless variety of family, corporate and community concerns.

THROUGH THE WRAPAROUND LENS© has incorporated the strength based, needs driven, highly individualized and family centered Wraparound Model, leaving the fundamental principles in place to mold/reconfigure it into a military model, a corporate model and to attack the very issues that could qualify a child for Wraparound services but by delivering the service BEFORE the crisis occurs (the child’s placement at his/her home at risk), fending off the problem, entirely.

STRATEGIC PLANNING: ACTING BEFORE A CRISIS

In the last case, it’s FAMILY MATTERS GROUP’s philosophy that the best plan is the advance plan; to surround the child and family’s issues on the FRONT END, in cases when there is enough evidence to support the probability that the child is struggling in areas that could lead to dangerous or catastrophic outcomes.

Rather than waiting for total academic failure, documentable substance abuse/addiction or juvenile justice interventions, when truancy may be perceived by a child as a means to escape punitive measures, FAMILY MATTERS GROUP believes in providing a family-centered Wraparound-approach that we call, “THROUGH THE WRAPAROUND LENS”.

THE REFERERAL PROCESS

Self-Referrals

FAMILY MATTERS GROUP accepts self-referrals to TTWL© (Through The Wraparound Lens©) from families who are able to do a good job of evaluating a child’s issues which are affecting the family unit. Our FMG team then evaluates the family’s information, conducts at least one phone interview an can determine whether this intervention is the most appropriate for the family, as well as the intervention that is most likely to be successful. If so, the process begins.

Program Referrals

When a child has been removed from home and sent away to “wilderness program” or “therapeutic residential program”, the outcome that is seldom revealed (other than those revealed in “testimonial statements” from happy customers), is the ability of the child to transition home. The challenge of bringing new skills home or maintaining any positive lessons about organization or responsibility, then implementing them into the family setting, the school setting and the community, is one transition that is unlikely, even for a student perceived as “successful” while away.

Programs can request TTWL© support prior to a child’s discharge home, preparing the family AND the child for a successful and meaningful reunification.

MEASURING SUCCESS

A measurement tool is implemented at the beginning of the process, re-administered every six months, then periodically, after a child and family “graduates” from TTWL©. This way, the family, Family Matters Foundation, and others who are invested in the success of this unique process can actually “see” progress, and track it as the family moves away from “crisis” and into self-sufficiency.