Family Culture Resiliency Factors: Ensuring Fidelity To The Wraparound Model

1. Family Culture Resiliency Factors: Ensuring Fidelity To The Wraparound Model Family Partnership Institute Bradley D. Norman, LCSW, Director Gerry R. Rodriguez, Associate Director

2. Seven Keys To Personal Resiliency • Mind Power - Creating the positive attitudes and belief systems to achieve lifelong personal power, success and happiness. • Emotional Intelligence - Acquiring the knowledge, self-discipline and skills that support healthy emotional, cognitive and social functioning. • Positive Relationships - Attaining the knowledge and skills that build healthy self-esteem and strengthen interpersonal relationships.

3. Mastery Learning - Developing Multiple Intelligences to maximize cognitive potential accelerate learning and enhance natural talents. • Moral Intelligence - Acquiring the personal values and principles that support living with respect, responsibility, integrity and compassion. • Compelling Future- Clarifying your personal vision and developing meaningful goals to create an exciting, positive and hopeful future. • Principled Leadership - Modeling and teaching the personal

4. Culture • Definition of Culture: The integrated pattern of human behavior that includes: • thoughts • communications • actions • customs • beliefs • values • and institutions of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group

5. Family Culture • The integrated pattern of family behavior that includes: • thoughts • communications • actions • customs • beliefs • values • and institutions of a racial, ethnic, religious or social group

6. Cultural Competence (Responsiveness) • A set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals, and enable that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations. (Cross, Bazron, Dennis, Isaacs, 1998)

7. Being Culturally Relevant With Families • The culturally relevant service provider • Holds culture and elements of culture in high esteem • Understands that cultural competence is a continuous process of assessing and broadening knowledge and respect for diverse individuals and communities • As a result • Relationships and interactions between service providers and families become less strained and goals are accomplished.

8. Fate of Children & Families With Most Complex Needs Mental Health Social Services Probation Service Portals Traditional Services 1% Fall Through The Cracks

9. Overview of Redesign Objectives • Partner to prevent child abuse and neglect • Act early to preserve and strengthen families • Broaden efforts to restore family capacity • Strengthen alternatives to rebuild permanent families for children • Systematically prepare youth for success in adulthood.

10. Wraparound Is… Keeping kids at home, in the community, with people who know, and love them in family-like settings. Wraparound is a planning process which creates a gateway for natural and community services… It is not an intervention.

11. Wraparound Processing Path 1. Concerns & Strengths 2. Identify Team Strengths • 10. Report and Evaluate ASK 3. Create Family Vision 9. Document and Implement LEARN LISTEN 4. Needs Identification 8. Secure Commitments 5. Prioritize Needs RESPOND 6. Develop Safety Plan 7. Create Strategies That Match Strengths

12. Wraparound “The following values and essential elements form the bases for the Wraparound Standards adopted by the State of California in April of 1999.” California Wraparound Standards

13. Family-Centered Strengths-Based Consumer-Driven Needs-Driven Individualized Culturally Relevant Unconditional Community-Based Team-Based Accountable Accessible Outcome-Based Cost- Effective Flexible Promoting Self-sufficiency Comprehensive Collaborative Wraparound ValuesCalifornia Wraparound Standards

14. Essential ElementsTen Essential Elements of Wraparound (Adopted from Burns and Goldman, 1998) “These values can also be found in the following essential elements list articulated, in May 1998, by a group of fifteen leaders and critical thinkers (representing the perspective of families, system and program developers, trainers, administration, program staff and researchers) in Wraparound.” California Wraparound Standards

15. 1. Families have a high level of decision-making power at every level of the Wraparounds process. • Families and children are an essential part of the planning process. No discussions or decisions are appropriate without their participation. • The child and family express their vision. What you like to have going on in your life when you graduate from Wraparound? Where would you like to be five years from now? The vision is created and all goals of the team are aligned with the vision.

16. 2. Team members are persevering in there commitment to the child and family. • Many solutions are tried until one is found that truly fits the family. The solution or strategy comes from the voice, choice, and access of the family. The strategy is implemented and tested overtime to ensure that it will continue to work after the wrap process is complete.

17. 3. Wraparound efforts are based inthe community and encourage the family’s use of their natural supports and resources. • Natural supports are essential! Without natural and community supports increasing over time there is no wraparound. The State of California has already acknowledged that the word “encourage” is weak in this instance. Meetings are held in the child and family’s home unless the child or family would prefer to meet somewhere else in the community. The idea is that we are teaching youth and families to have informal community meetings so that when we are gone they will continue to feel that they can call informal meetings to meet future needs. This is a skill we want them to graduate with.

18. 4. The Wraparound approach is a team-driven process involving the family, child, natural supports, agencies, and community services working together to develop, implement, and evaluate the individualized service plan. • This defines the approach to the planning process as being an inclusive process that covers all areas of the child’s life. The process covers all community mandates and family’s desires within one plan that allows for “normal” family functioning.

19. 5. Services and supports are individualized, built on strengths, and meet the needs of children and families across the life domains to promote success, safety, and permanency in home, school, and the community. • The descriptors “Individualized” and “Customized” highlight that wraparound is custom made for each family. • Functional strengths are identified. Example: Strength, Mother is an avid reader. Therefore, Mother will read a book on family rules and bring the information to the next meeting. • The purpose of this is to build strategies for families that are culturally relevant and that will be implemented because they are the family’s natural mode of operating

20. 6. The process is culturally competent, building on the unique values, preferences, and strengths of children, families and their communities. • When we bring in natural and community supports there is automatic culturally responsiveness. • If a plan is not culturally responsive it implies that the process did not employ family voice, choice and access.

21. 7. The plan is developed and implemented based on an interagency, community/neighborhood collaborative process. • This element refers to the fact that we want one comprehensive plan that fits in naturally with “normal” family life. • The key word here is “collaborative process” the family’s involvement is central to this process. • No discussions or decisions are held without the family and child.

22. 8. Wraparound plans include abalance of formal services and informal community and family resources, with eventually greater reliance on informal services. • This refers to the fact that wraparound families are usually isolated when they began the process. • As the wraparound process begins to take effect there will naturally be less and less formal supports. • Some families will become independent of all formal supports and some will have continued need of life long formal support in some area.

23. 9. Wraparound teams have adequate and flexible funding. • This refers to the mandated availability of funds for emergency, one-time, expenses that cannot be funded through any other source. • Agencies need these funds to hire and maintain staff and other expenses. • There is no specific amount that families receive. • All flexible fund expenditures are decided upon at team meetings with the thought in mind that we are working towards the family’s self-sufficiency. • The team never wants to procure anything that the family will not be able to sustain on their own once the wraparound process is complete.

24. 10. Outcomes are determined and measured for the system, for the program, and for the individual child and family. • Outcomes for the individual child and family team are evaluated at every team meeting through the wraparound agenda and minutes process. • Outcomes are measured for the program internally through the supervisor and externally through the community review team. • Outcomes are determined for the system through county and state review processes.

25. National Published StudiesTwo Randomized Published Studies • Increase in home, school, community functioning • Improved permanency • Decrease in days and number of suspensions • Decrease in runaway behavior • Decreased incarceration (2.6 times less likely) • Decrease in delinquency and conduct disorder • Decrease in problem behavior.

26. Eleven National Published Pre-Post Studies • Improvement in permanency • Improvement in self-control • Improvements in home, school, and community, role performance • Decrease in problem behaviors • 85% decrease in arrests • Decrease in hyperactivity • Decrease in abuse related behaviors • Decrease in substance use • Decrease in hospital admissions • Decrease in out-of-home placements.

27. Wraparound Research • Body of Research • WFI • WOF • National Wraparound Initiative

28. Thank You! Contact Information: • grodriguez@emq.org • 408-437-8356