The authors present guidelines for social work practice in the growing, interdisciplinary field of family-support programs. The history and contemporary form of family-support programs are described, and a “best practice” approach is delineated. Emergent areas are discussed, and the salience of social work's contribution in family-support programs is identified. Innovative aspects of the family-support approach include family-building and family-strengthening activities, an educational framework for intervention, the mediating function of family support, and multilevel approaches to developing community.

This chapter describes integrated family center practice that offers protection, nurturance, and avenues for development for parents and their children. The focus is the integrated family center (or family resource center) as a community-based single-site system of care, which arguably has an important role in the development of safe communities and new visions for children's services. As an alternative to existing child welfare services, they address fragmentation, defensive practice, and the disconnection from community that are serious problems in protective services. As stable community-based programs, integrated family centers provide a therapeutic milieu with a complex array of services to meet child welfare's primary goal: child well-being and family support. These integrated centers have the advantage of being a community, a place to belong to that grows with the family.

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The culture of mental health care is being reshaped through community-based innovations, both across the United States and internationally, that are enabling healing and recovery in community. This chapter presents where the evolving traditions of community-based clinical practice have been most influential. As the practice examples in this volume are previewed, the values and perspectives of community work come to life. The chapter shows that mental health care is being transformed through clinicians' recognition that working with the resourcefulness and meaning of community is more than simply working in community.