In an exploratory study of family support services in Massachusetts, three focus groups were convened to obtain the perspectives of parents caring for individuals with developmental disabilities and living at home. This article summarizes key themes that emerged from the group discussions: effects of family supports on family life, flexibility of supports, barriers, unmet needs, and recommendations for change. Social workers and health care professionals can enhance the well-being of people with developmental disabilities and their families by addressing the needs of the entire family, facilitating family choice and control of supports, and helping families navigate the complex service system.

This article describes and recommends a participatory method of developing, implementing, and evaluating a learner-driven community-based continuing education effort for HIV workers and supervisors. The Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW) created and delivered a training program in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health HIV/AIDS Bureau (the Bureau). Because teaching empowerment-based practice was an overarching goal, every step of the process modeled collaboration and self-determination. The program was unusual in several ways: the workshops focused on basic helping skills rather than the medical aspects of HIV; community stakeholders shaped the workshops in consultation with staff from the Bureau and BUSSW; a formative evaluation led to adaptations of the curriculum in the first few months of the project; objectives were set in part by learners, who evaluated themselves on goal attainment; and follow-up interviews explored the effects of the workshops on practice. Most supervisors and direct care workers reported that the workshops were highly relevant to their work and that they were able to incorporate their learning into practice, suggesting that the empowerment approach has utility. The report includes the genesis and necessity of the project; the principles underpinning it; the use of empowerment at each stage; and implications for administrators, service providers, and educators in the HIV field. We propose that resources dedicated to collaborative or participatory curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation are well spent.

HIV disease is now a major reason that grandparents and other older caregivers assume custodial care of minor children whose parents have died or become incapacitated. Grandparents are becoming custodial parents for a growing number of orphaned children, either through kinship care or informal means. Although these older caregivers are raising minors again because their adult children are unavailable due to a life threatening illness, we know little about whether these older surrogate parents are planning for the eventuality of their own deaths. This exploratory, qualitative, grounded theory study explored the permanency planning experiences of older caregivers of HIV-affected and HIV-infected minor children. Five barriers emerged impeding the permanency planning process for these older caregivers: Lack of knowledge about the legal process, lack of legal authority, emotional concerns, lack of informal social support, and HIV-related stigma. Implications for gerontological social work include the need for more supportive and le-