Child welfare struggles to manage child abuse and neglect and to seek permanency for children, while being culturally responsive to the communities it serves. Family group conferencing, piloted in New Zealand and now used in the United States and other countries, is a strengths-based model that brings together families and their support systems to develop and carry out a plan that protects, nurtures, and safeguards children and other family members. This article describes the model and a culturally competent method for assessing and adapting the model for the African American, Cherokee, and Latino/Hispanic communities in North Carolina.

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Family Group Conferencing (FGC) is a method of bringing together a family group with service providers to come up with a plan to resolve problems in individual and social functioning. This paper describes FGC from a group development perspective involving planning and convening the single-session meeting. The FGC moves along with the help of a group worker called a coordinator, but its success is based on people-citizens-banding together. The core of the convening stage is when families are left alone, equipped with resources at their disposal, to determine a plan for change.

Child welfare systems in the United States are failing to include families in making plans, and this reduces their success in stabilizing children's placements and promoting children's well-being. A North Carolina study demonstrates how one restorative practice-family group conferencing (FGC)-advances family participation in child welfare planning. A sample of 27 conferences showed that the 221 family group members outnumbered the 115 service providers at the meetings. Family group members were usually satisfied with the conference process and decision and saw the plans as primarily reached through consensus, following a trusted leader, and bargaining. Satisfaction with the decision was reduced when bargaining was employed. Manipulation was more likely to occur when conference preparations were inadequate.Child welfare systems across the United States are substantially out of conformity with national standards for child outcomes and service delivery (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2003). In particular, they are failing to involve families in making plans, and as a result, their success in stabilizing children's placements and promoting children's well-being is reduced. These performance deficiencies are, in part, a function of the high volume of child welfare work, rapid turnover of staff, and national trends that overload the capacity of families to care for their children.