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Teaming: Engaging Families in Decision Making

Engaging families. It’s a term child welfare professionals use, but what does it mean?

Generally, it means finding substantive ways to include families in deciding what will happen when a young person is in or at risk of entering the child welfare system. Would services to the family keep a child out of foster care? Does a child need to be removed from the family? If so, can the child be placed with relatives or friends?

One way to involve families is through family teaming approaches. These approaches bring together families and other adults familiar to the child to work with community representatives and professionals on planning and decision-making teams. While the teaming approaches used nationwide have many similarities, they are often employed at different points in time and within different contexts – for example, in preventive situations, child welfare interventions, or in court, juvenile justice, or community settings.

With the proliferation of family-meeting approaches, some practitioners are asking whether a continuum of approaches might be appropriate to meet the evolving needs of youth and families over time.

States use many approaches

Results from the first round of Child and Family Services Reviews indicate 45 states now use one or more teaming approaches. Seventeen different terms were used to describe these practices, of which the most common include:

• Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) — 38 percent
• Family Group Conferences (FGCs) — 38 percent
• Family Team Meetings (FTMs) — 24 percent

While some state reports refer to a specific teaming model or approach, others clearly use terms such as “family meetings” or “family conferencing” in more generic ways. Still others have developed methods specific to their state’s cultural milieu, such as Hawaii’s ’Ohana family conferencing, which makes characterizing family involvement strategies challenging.

Exploring teaming approaches

For this article, Casey Family Services contacted experts to discuss the similarities and differences among four teaming approaches: Family Group Decision Making/Family Group Conferencing (FGDM/FGC); Family Team Conferences (FTC); Team Decision Making (TDM); and the Permanency Teaming Process (PTP).

We learned that the approaches have these principles or beliefs in common:

• All families have strengths
• Families are experts on themselves
• Families deserve to be treated with dignity and respect
• Families can make well-informed decisions about keeping their children safe when families are supported
• When families are involved in decision making, outcomes can improve
• A team is often better able to engage in creative, high-quality problem solving than is an individual

Based on input from teaming experts, Connections Count developed a grid (PDF), modeled after a similar one developed by Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family to Family initiative, to compare aspects of the different approaches. Although the values that drive the teaming approaches are similar, implementation strategies vary:

• Goals and structure. All approaches seek to involve families in a strengths-based, solutions-focused team that plans for a child’s safety, well-being, and permanence. TDM meetings are meetings held in response to an event – an imminent threat of removal or placement change, for instance. Other approaches use meetings as part of a process that unfolds over time. While all approaches give priority to family opinions, FGDM/FGC requires private family time during each meeting.
  
  
• Team members. All approaches encourage teams that include a wide array of adults familiar to the child: birth parents, extended family, non-relative supports, and caregivers if the child isn’t living at home. They also involve providers and other professionals needed to move the case along: neighborhood or community representatives; partners and service providers; social workers and agency staff; attorneys; and Court Appointed Special Advocates/Guardian Ad Litems. In TDM, participants must be approved by the family or have a right to participate as “treatment team” members. In FGDM/FGC, the family plays a key role in deciding who is defined as “family.” In PTP, team members are drawn from the youth’s natural network – that is, family and others known to and identified by the youth.
  
  
• Preparation. All approaches consider preparing family members for the meeting as vital to positive outcomes. Those responsible for the preparation vary: In TDM, the social worker does this work. In FTC, it is done by the social worker or sometimes the community worker. PTP uses individual and small meetings, plus a clinical focus on the impact of trauma, to prepare team members for large group meetings and, ultimately, for permanence.
  
  
• Facilitation and decision making. Each approach requires team facilitators to be trained and to utilize strong group skills. The approaches vary based on whether facilitators are agency staff and participate in team decisions – as in TDM, FTC, and PTP – or have no specific case responsibilities or decision-making roles – as is the case with FGDM – in which coordinators work either for the child welfare agency or a community-based organization. For each approach, the family is at the center of decision making, with the ultimate approval of the plan resting with the child welfare agency and, when applicable, the court.

Learn More

• Download Family Teaming: Comparing Approaches (PDF), which defines and compares four teaming approaches.
• Read Families Gaining Their Seat at the Table: Family Engagement Strategies in the First Round of Child and Family Services Reviews and Program Improvement Plans (PDF).

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