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Use of Family Teaming Models on the Rise

In the last several decades, restorative justice models that put people involved in a challenging situation at the center of decision making have influenced child welfare practice. In child protection, that means involving young people, their families, and in some cases, community members to craft solutions to problems. The result has been a proliferation of family-meeting approaches (sometimes called family teaming models) that engage youth, families, and others in child welfare planning and decision making.

Although many agencies use team-based models, tremendous variations in these models exist. Differences relate to the purpose and goals of the decision-making process, the timing and frequency of meetings, and the type and level of preparation for meetings. Other variables include who facilitates the process, who participates, and who makes final decisions.

Frequently used teaming models include Family Group Decision Making, Family Team Conferencing, Team Decision Making, the Permanency Teaming Process, and several others. To learn more about specific teaming models, see Family Teaming: Comparing Approaches (PDF).

Teaming for permanence

After years of providing direct service, Casey has come to believe that a focus on permanence can enhance any teaming model, especially when those teaming models:

• Include more than professionals. Engaging young people, their families, and people who care about them is key. The question is not whether to include a young person or family members on a team, but how.


• Focus on the young person’s need for family through an ongoing process. As a tool for reaching permanence, youth often benefit when teaming is not a single event but a process for building relationships that addresses safety, well-being, and permanence.


• Address time constraints. Young people need family urgently, yet relationships take time to grow. Permanency teaming models can accommodate these two realities in developmentally and culturally sensitive ways.


• Address trauma, grief, and loss. Preparing young people and their families makes a difference – so does helping young people clarify what has happened in their lives, negotiate complex family relationships, and participate in permanency planning.


• Consider concrete needs. Teaming can help identify and address concrete needs that are barriers to permanence. For example, services such as housing or assistance with basic needs may make reunification with parents possible, and flexible financial support may allow a relative to become a youth’s guardian or foster parents to adopt a young person.


• Help educate other systems about a young person’s need for family. Youth benefit when providers and partners understand the rewards of collaborative planning with family to meet a young person’s needs for mental health, education, employment, training, and housing resources.

Teaming examples

Teaming strategies that focus on family permanence stabilize young people’s placements and reconnect them with their parents or, if that’s not possible, with kin or other familiar adults. The following examples describe how different teaming strategies increased permanency outcomes for young people:

• In a preliminary evaluation of family team meetings in Washington, D.C., caseworkers and magistrates reported the meetings were vital to easing tension and increasing focus on children’s needs. Children whose families participated returned home at higher rates than those whose families did not.¹


• In Texas, children whose families participated in Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) meetings were more likely to be reunified with family than those whose families did not. Also, time spent in foster care was diminished for FGDM families. While the teaming strategy improved reunification rates generally, the best outcomes were among black and Hispanic families.²


• In Linn County, Iowa, two pilot studies using community partnership strategies and family team meetings achieved successful reunification for 50 percent of young people in residential treatment facilities. For those in shelter care, nearly 75 percent returned home or were placed with close relatives.³


• Utah has instituted family consultation teams and new accountability systems to measure performance. In 2003, the state’s rate of children in out-of-home care was the lowest in the country, at 2.7 per 1,000 children.⁴


• By instituting team meetings as a primary permanency strategy, Maine has reduced the number of young people in residential facilities from 770 in 2004 to 465 in 2006 – a reduction of nearly 40 percent.⁵


• Louisville, Kentucky, partnered with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family to Family initiative to implement team decision making as a major strategy for child welfare reform. By routinely involving relatives and community partners in team meetings, more than 34 percent of young people identified by case workers as needing removal were able to stay safely at home, with help from crisis services and community supports. For those who did enter foster care, 27 percent were placed with relatives.

Excerpted from pages 9 to11 of “Young People Need Families” (2008) by the Annie E. Casey Foundation/Casey Family Services and Casey Family Programs.

Footnotes

¹ Edwards, M., & Tinworth, K. (2005). Family Team Meeting (FTM) process, outcome, and impact evaluation phase II report. Englewood, Colorado: American Humane Association.
² Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. 2006. Family Group Decision-Making: Final Evaluation. Austin, Texas: Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
³ The Annie E. Casey Foundation. (2007). KIDS COUNT essay: Life long connections: Supporting permanence for children in foster care. Baltimore, Maryland: The Annie E. Casey Foundation.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Beougher, James. (2004). “Child Welfare Reform in Maine.” Policy & Practice 62(4)

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